This is great, just great.

The Federal Labor Relations Authority has decided that T&A workers can now vote on union representation.

T&A holds all the cards, 50,000 of them. Can you imagine the romancing - and the $$$ - the 50,000 member T&A will enjoy from the American Federation of Government Employees and the National Treasury Employees Union? Controlling an additional 50,000 members, along with their 50,000 dues, is a wonderful thing and well worth any amount of candy and flowers.

It's just what we need, adding more members to public employee unions with out-of-control pensions and protections.

It's back to the old career politicians-special interests (public employees)-buying votes ~ same old, same old.

This pull quote from Harvard's Phillip Greenspun's book review of While America Aged: How Pension Debts Ruined General Motors, Stopped the NYC Subways, Bankrupted San Diego, and Loom as the Next Financial Crisis offers a short history of how public employee unions came into being and the devastating effect they are having on state and federal budgets, and our tax bills:

...in 1958 when an aide to New York Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr. suggested that city workers could be a large enough voting bloc to ensure his reelection. Wager signed an executive order authorizing city workers, notably those of the transit system, to unionize and bargain collectively...

Read this out loud twice:

Once a sufficiently high percentage of voters are unionized public employees, there is essentially no limit to the obligations imposed on the state. Because it would cause too much backlash from non-union non-government employed voters, most of the money extracted from taxpayers will be taken in the form of long-term health care and pension promises. A voter working at Walmart gets upset hearing that a bus driver is earning $130,000 per year. If instead the bus driver is paid $70,000 per year and able to retire at age 41 (MBTA here in Boston), it is tougher for a voter to figure out how much is being spent. Pushing most of the spending out 10-50 years gives the politicians who agreed to the obligations at least 10 years in which to move to the next level of government before the true cost of the agreement becomes apparent. 

Get it? Once the number of public employees passes the tipping point ~ the number needed to elect the politicians who will, in turn, reward those votes with ever more generous benefits and pensions ~ the cost of public employees can only grow larger, at least until someone steps in and says enough is enough.

Buying votes grows the size of government...

Sure, plenty of people on the left (and some people on the right) really believe government does the best job taking care of education, transportation and just about every other aspect of our lives; they think it's being nice. It's also an excellent way to buy votes.

It goes like this: politicians, via the political process, beef up the compensation, benefits, pensions and job security of government workers (from teachers to bureaucrats on both the federal and the state level) who, in turn, happily vote for those same politicians when their terms are up. Of course, in order to keep those votes bought and paid for, compensation for government employees has to be continually sweetened ~ an unending cycle of increased costs paid for by taxpayers.

Thus, the tremendous budget meltdowns in left-leaning states like California. But, as someone says, the chickens have come home to roost:

The Washington Post

The Washington Examiner

While California Democrats, for the most part, held onto their seats on November 2, their state is a fiscal disaster.

My pull quote & emphasis from an article on California Watch:

But the latest report from current state Treasurer Bill Lockyer says the state now has $77.8 billion in outstanding general obligation bonds – nearly triple the amount of seven years ago – and an additional $42.8 in authorized but unissued bonds.

General obligation bonds must be paid from revenues coming from the state's general fund, meaning that debt payments reduce funds available for other services. 

In fact, along with its overall debt burden, California's debt payments have tripled, from $1.8 billion paid in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2004, to a staggering $5.5 billion in the current fiscal year ending June 30, 2011. 

Wow. California's fiscal problems aren't due only to political payoffs to government employees, but they play a large part. Out of control entitlements, used just as effectively to buy votes, have become unsustainable as well. Forget about earthquakes, California will implode before The Big One hits.