Thursday, February 17, 2011

Public Sector Compensation Cuts for Thee, But Not For Me

As Kevin Drum points out, the attempts to gut public sector unions in Wisconsin exempt police, firefighters, and state troopers. In practice this means the major union workers affected will be teachers, prison guards, state-employed health care workers, and so forth. In the aggregate, then, the changes will affect unions that lean towards Democrats, while leaving unions that lean towards Republicans untouched. But it's precisely these untouched unions that generate the worst cases of generous public sector compensation. It's hard to say that government compensation is the most critical issue in state governance these days, but if we're going to "get serious" about it, it makes sense to put everything on the table.

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