Over the past year there has been a steady drumbeat of criticism focused on public unions and the havoc they have wrought on our public finances. Governments — city, country, state and federal — are drowning in red ink. What is to be done?

By Ed Lasky at American Thinker

We have reached a potential turning point in the relationship of public employee unions and the electorate they ostensibly serve. Over the past year there has been a steady drumbeat of criticism focused on public unions and the havoc they have wrought on our public finances. Governments — city, country, state and federal — are drowning in red ink. Our taxes are flowing to ever voracious government workers (whose own ranks are growing steadily while the private payrolls shrink); they are better compensated than private workers in comparable positions.

What is to be done?

We — taxpayers, tea partiers and sympathizers, independents, Republicans, and Democrats — need to come together and forge a blueprint to take back our nation. The inclusion of Democrats was deliberate — despite the fact that many Democrat politicians are in the pockets of public unions. AFSCME, the government employee union, has a political action committee that is the second largest in the nation and virtually all of its donations are to Democrats; ditto the teachers’ unions or, as they like to call themselves, “federations” and “associations” — teachers know how to use thesauruses for political purposes. But when liberal newspapers such as the New York Times now report on subway conductors earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and the Boston Globe takes editorial swipes at public employee unions and their greedy and self-centered leadership, the timing may be ripe for Democrats to come out of the closet and transform themselves from donkeys into fiscal hawks (see Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s efforts in Los Angeles).

When that arbiter of popular culture Saturday Night Live makes fun of surly government workers we may have reached a turning point. Hope springs eternal on the political front, but what can people power do to weaken the grip of public employee unions and restore fiscal sanity to our governments’ budgets?

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