Using as cover the coronavirus pandemic and the massive economic shock resulting from political efforts to contain it, members of Congress backing Big Labor have rubber-stamped a $3 trillion, federal taxpayer-funded bailout package that rewards America’s most fiscally irresponsible state politicians.
On May 15, the House briefly returned to Capitol Hill to ram through, on a 208-199 vote, bailout legislation (H.R.6800) cynically mislabeled as the “HEROES Act.”
Powerful government union bosses such as Randi Weingarten, chief of the 1.7 million-member American Federation of Teachers, and Lee Saunders, kingpin of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, heartily applauded.
Saunders and his lieutenants have been “hitting the national airwaves” with TV and internet ads in key 2020 presidential and Senate battleground states, demanding that Congress adopt a new, no-strings-attached “relief” package for states and localities, on top of the more than $200 billion in direct aid, plus up to $500 billion in loans, that were OK’d within weeks after the coronavirus lockdowns commenced.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s obvious aim is, in the words of Stanford finance professor Joshua Rauh, to turn “coronavirus relief” into a “federal bailout of states and municipalities that have mismanaged their funds for decades.” She and House Majority Whip Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, have acted with incredible speed to fulfill union bosses’ wishes.
On May 12, Pelosi and Hoyer unveiled H.R.6800, which includes nearly $1.1 trillion in funds for state and local governments.
This enormous sum of bailout money would supposedly go to help public officials close temporary budget gaps that are direct results of coronavirus shutdowns. But the plain fact is that the catastrophic deficits and soaring long-term debts now being reported by Big Labor-dominated states, such as New York, Illinois, and California, are primarily the result of chronic out-of-control spending and other poor budgetary decisions by union-label politicians.
Of course, all 50 states are now hurting fiscally as a consequence of plummeting business, sales, personal income, and other tax revenues. But the enormous budget problems now faced by the Empire State, for example, are obviously rooted in longstanding policies that authorize the firing of employees for refusal to pay union dues or fees as a job condition and grant monopoly privileges to government union bosses.
As a May 18 Wall Street Journal editorial pointed out, profligate New York politicians spend nearly twice as much per Medicaid beneficiary and 6 times as much on nursing homes as do their counterparts in right-to-work Florida. Union bosses who wield “exclusive” bargaining power over employees at many nursing homes and hospitals in New York have exploited their political clout to make such facilities extraordinarily expensive.
As costly as New York’s healthcare system is, its K-12 public education system may be even more wasteful. In 2017, New York spent $69 billion on primary and secondary schools, more than twice Florida’s $28 billion, even though more children are enrolled in Florida’s public schools than in New York’s. Meanwhile, a 2018 analysis that adjusts for key demographic differences among public school students in different states showed that Florida’s education outcomes are the third-best in the nation. New York comes in 31st.
Because the Pelosi bailout scheme allocates more than twice as much money to states and localities as their estimated total coronavirus-related revenue losses over the rest of FY 2020 and FY 2021, it will almost inevitably fuel even more wasteful spending. The big beneficiaries are government union bosses in Big Labor-dominated fiscal sinkhole states such as New York, California, and Illinois and politicians who are allied with them.
As a single-issue organization dedicated to fighting compulsory unionism, the National Right to Work Committee takes no stand on the propriety of federal bailouts per se, even as we acknowledge that concerned citizens may well question the wisdom of Congress’s adding now to the nearly $3 trillion it has already spent on coronavirus relief.
But committee members across the country will fight furiously to block in the Senate the so-called “HEROES Act” and any other legislation that would bail out fiscally reckless politicians in union boss-owned states such as New York.
Mark Mix is president of the National Right to Work Committee.
