This article came to me via email and all emphasis is theirs. Read and weep, either that or get pissed off and step up to do something about it. We cannot do this alone.

Public employee unions killing state’s economy

The heart-wrenching picture on the front page of Thursday’s Buffalo News of the long line of people waiting to be fed tells many stories and prompts a modest plea or two.

In the near term, everything must be done to ensure that government provides people’s most basic needs. One doubts, however, that the out-of-town dignitaries celebrating the opening of the Erie Canal Harbor took time to visit any of these charity kitchens. (Hillary and Chuck should have seen this?? They were in town for the photo ops, but I seriously doubt Hillary gives a damn about Western New York….until election time!! All she cares about is collecting the millions and tens of millions in campaign donations from her favorite union…the New York State United Teachers. )

If they had, their brief encounter with quiet desperation just might have prompted a sliver of doubt in some of the Democratic notables about the pillar of New York’s economy.

That pillar, since the Taylor Law fell on the state in 1967, is that public employee unions call the tune on all policy issues in Albany.

The current evidence of union muscle is its thwarting of Gov. David A. Paterson’s efforts to cap the property tax.

The Taylor Law, and its amendments by rule, guarantee not only bargaining rights to public employees, but virtually assure that there will be no cutbacks in employer net pay, or benefits, or pensions that private-sector workers are experiencing all over the nation.

It makes difficult, if not impossible, any government economies by privatizing services.

The law guarantees that via compulsory deductions, public unions assemble powerful war chests that give them in this state unchallenged sway in elections. (And they virtually ALWAYS support democrats)

These union treasuries also come into play when districts for the State Senate and Assembly are redrawn to guarantee the permanent incumbency that has reduced our Legislature to a national joke, and a bad one at that.

The same day that News reporter Tom Buckham chronicled life in Buffalo’s soup kitchens, a counterpoint sounded in far off Virginia.

Gov. Tim Kaine announced that for the third year in a row, Virginia led the nation in moving its welfare clients into private jobs, and also leads the country in job retention by former welfare clients.

Virginia is meeting economic hardship as it usually does by cutting back on non-emergency government payrolls and exercising fearsome restraint on taxes, despite liberal Democrat Kaine. In New York, according to a national survey, taxes are going up another $1.5 billion and there will be no cuts in the state’s bloated public sector. Guess why.

Unions in Virginia, public and private, do not have exclusive bargaining powers and therefore lack the stifling political clout they have amassed in New York.

As a result, Virginia sales taxes are three to four points lower than in New York, real property taxes are a fourth of New York’s and the income tax is about half of the vampire state’s.

In New York, prospective investors, outside the custodial class, are just not going to pay the freight that public employees devour, particularly upstate.

By contrast, there are private jobs in the Commonwealth. In May, its unemployment rate, despite a continuing surge of population, was 3.8 percent. New York’s, despite the exodus of upstate families, was officially listed at 5.2 percent, not counting New Yorkers who stopped looking long ago.

At the end of these bread lines there is a message: Something has to sharply curtail the power of New York’s public unions, or the taxes they generate will eat up what little remains of private-sector jobs and produce longer lines of hungry people.

Right now, this core objective is not in our economic language, even in the dispatches of the New York State Business Council, or the business advocacy group Unshackle Upstate. They’re not talking growth and job opportunities.

The groups’ initiatives just move chess pieces around on a broken game board, timidly nibbling at the edges of the hemisphere’s second-last, government-controlled economy, after Cuba.

dturner@buffnews.com