Thursday, March 25, 2010

The Growing Gap between Govt and Private Sector Benefits

The other day I posted an article titled "Shame On Everyone For Obamacare" which raised some comments from members of the Teamsters Union. They were upset by the fact that I pointed out that it's the unions who lobbied for Congress to mandate that employers offer healthcare. This gave the insurance co's the monopoly they wanted and was suppose to keep the cost down, remember? DID IT?

Then the unions started demanding more coverage at the employers expense, keep in mind, the employee only paid about 10% of the cost of the policy and the employer paid the rest. Then the unions went after healthcare as part of their retirement package. This was all well and good for a while, but over time, it became unsustainable for the companies to pay retirees while paying for those still working. NAFTA came to the rescue and we started loosing jobs as our manufacturing moved overseas.

The Teamsters at Ford learned a lesson. They either reduced the burden or lost their jobs. That's why Ford didn't need to be bailed out like GM.

But what about our state and local employee unions? Are we going to see some sort of Free Trade Agreement that sends our State and Local Governments overseas? Not likely, instead, we will all just go bankrupt because these Unions know they can force us to pay more TAXES to support them.

I found this site this morning with all these charts comparing the Government sector to the Private sector.

Mandel on Innovation and Growth
The Growing Gap between Govt and Private Sector Benefits

When I was out in Kansas City at the Kauffman Foundation’s Economic Bloggers Forum, Mish Shedlock of the blog Global Economic Trend Analysis made a persuasive case that state and local finances were completely broken because gov’t workers were overpaid compared to the private sector. ( See here for one of his posts on the subject).

Mish got me thinking…So I decided to assemble some BLS data on the subject.

Not to mince words, here’s the payoff chart, that compares the benefits of state and local workers with private sector workers. (These figures are adjusted for inflation, and indexed to 2001I=100). FULL STORY


Our own Muskegon Pundit has been attending our County Board Meetings. What a great example of just how out of control OUR Union Employees are.

4. Wait-a-minute!

County retirees get dental benefits??!!!!

What's that cost?

Do you get retirement dental?

Gimme a break!

To approve Professional Benefits Services (PBS) for the Third Party Administration of the Muskegon County retiree dental plan from 4/1/2010 -9/30/2012 at a rate of $1.90 per line item.
READ FULL REPORT

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