New York City’s Department of Investigation (DOI) announced Friday that it is looking into reports that some Sanitation Department supervisors told workers to slow their snow removal efforts as a protest against budget cuts. DOI spokeswoman Diane Struzzi told Businessweek: “What we are looking at is whether there was intentional …
Hamtramck, Michigan, is running out of money. City Manager William Cooper tells The New York Times: “We can make it until March 1—maybe.” And Hamtramck is not alone. According to the Times, 15 municipalities have pursued bankruptcy in the past two years. And if the economy does not improve revenues, …
The Senate may soon consider a bill that would force states to allow for the unionization of public employees. In addition to the extraordinary amount of mandates imposed under President Obama, Congress has been attempting to extend the burden of collective bargaining imposed upon every state and local government. Senate …
The Cartel, a searing education documentary, opens nationwide on Wednesday. The film, by director Bob Bowden, exposes where our multiplying education tax dollars are going. Spoiler alert: In too many instances, they aren’t going toward teaching children. Bowden focuses on New Jersey, a state that spends over $17,000 per student …
The campaign to paper over President Barack Obama’s big government tax-and-spend record with symbolic political triangulation has begun. Yesterday, ahead of today’s meeting with House and Senate Republicans, President Obama attempted to preempt conservative calls for smaller government by announcing a Federal Employee Pay Freeze, which the White House says …
President Barack Obama announced today that he will ask Congress to freeze federal worker pay for the next two years saving $5 billion through 2012. Good for him. This is a welcome acknowledgment on two fronts: 1) that, as Heritage research has definitively shown, federal workers are paid more than …
In an article titled “Scapegoating Federal Pay,” Paul Waldman of The American Prospect predicts that we will hear much more in the coming months about “outsized federal paychecks.” I hope he is right. The labor economics literature, going back more than two decades, is clear that federal workers enjoy a …
Yesterday the USA Today reported that not only has the number of federal workers making more than $150,000 a year doubled since President Barack Obama took office, but that President Obama wants to give federal workers a 1.4% across-the-board pay raise. The two government union spokespeople in the article both …
