Saturday, January 29, 2011


GOP budget cuts hit Democratic campaign cash sources hard
There are at least two ways of looking at the fact the $2.5 trillion in spending cuts proposed last week by leaders of the House Republican Study Committee will hurt one of the biggest sources of Democratic campaign cash.

Among the proposals, which you can read about here and here, is a federal pay freeze and a 15 percent reduction in the federal workforce through attrition. If the proposal becomes law, it will freeze the income of hundreds of thousands of government employee unions and significantly reduce the number of dues-paying members of those unions....

...In other words, Democrats got 82 percent of the campaign cash contributed by federal employee unions.

MAPLight points to another interesting aspect of this question, noting that contributions from defense industry firms are almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, though with a slight tilt in favor of the latter....

Where the cash goes, the Democratic policy flows
Employees and political action committees of organizations that make up the big four special interests that own the Democratic Party contributed hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to the party's federal candidates in 2010.

The top 20 labor unions, for example, gave more than $68 million in 2010, with 94 percent of the total going to Democrats and just 4 percent to Republicans. Most of the total, 88 percent, came from PACs associated with the top 20 unions, while the remaining 12 percent came from individual union members, according to Opensecrets.org....


Examiner Editorial: Time to get real about public-sector pensions
Despite the dire financial condition of his state, and the fact that it was (and still is) a sovereign deadbeat that fails to pay its bills, Illinois Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn found room to cut a sweetheart deal with its public employee unions in September. They were guaranteed two years of cost-of-living increases and no layoffs. Quinn, in turn, got the union's endorsement and won his 2010 election by less than 1 percentage point.

This provides a dramatic illustration of what has for years been political business as usual for liberals in public office. To save their own jobs, they cut deals with your money, offering premium benefits and exorbitant salaries to public workers. Much of the cost is deferred until these employees retire, and so the unfunded liabilities of public pensions have become enormous, threatening states and cities with imminent insolvency. By some estimates, state and municipal governments will have to come up with $3.5 trillion in new funds just to keep the pension checks going out....