Feel the taxpayers' heat

Pay hike for fire fighters is budget-buster



by Michael Graham
DNN Staff -EXCLUSIVE!
Monday, Apr. 26,2010

Mayor Menino, you’re not going to win this fight relying on your good looks and soaring rhetoric.

No, to stop the spending monster unleashed by an arbitrator on Boston last week, you’re going to need a crucifix and a wooden stake. Or, at the very least, an angry, pitchfork-wielding mob.

More on them - or should I say “us” - later.

There are many terrifying numbers in this fiscal horror story.

$74 million - the money it will take to raise the pay of Boston firefighters by 19 percent over their 2006 salaries.

$30 million - the gap between the money Boston had set aside for raises and the actual costs.

$3.5 million - how much more this pay hike will cost next year alone.

But the numbers that will keep the mayor and council up at night are 44 and 55.

The Boston firefighters union’s budget-busting deal is just one of the 44 contract negotiations the city has to handle. Which means there are 43 other government worker cabals waiting to be fed. Now they smell blood.

And 55? That’s the age at which Boston firefighters can retire on their generous pensions and benefits - often while going on to another full-time career. Maybe a full-time government career.

Double-dipping: It’s not just for bureaucrats anymore . . .

So now take the salaries of firefighters like Messrs. Maloney, Little and Mason, for example - names I picked at random from bostonherald.com’s excellent “Public Records Database” and who each earned well over $100K last year. Now increase those six-figure salaries by 19 percent (give or take, depending on overtime or special duty) and then multiply the cost to taxpayers, not just for the length of their fine careers, but for 30 years after.

Now keep retiring more and more of these well-paid city employees year after year, all living longer and longer, and you can see why Menino looked so pale in Tuesday’s paper. He had seen the fiscal horror show awaiting all of us.

I don’t blame the firefighters for gloating. Menino asked for arbitration so they get to have their cake and hit him in the face with it, too.

But a 19-percent pay raise in this economy is more than a chance to mock Menino. It’s a punch in the gut for every city taxpayer.

I have a question for the cowardly Ed Kelly, the union president who was spotted running from reporters as recently as yesterday. Ed, how many of your neighbors who work in the private sector are earning 19 percent more today than they did in 2006?

Actually, we have an idea. U.S. incomes went down an average of more than 3 percent last year. And according to MSNBC, metro Boston lost still more jobs in 2009.

But these workers, these taxpayers and these (for the moment, at least) homeowners now have to pony up millions today, and hundreds of millions more over the next decade. All to pay benefits for government workers that far exceed what they’re getting from their own jobs.

Which brings us back to that torch-waving mob.

When it comes to confronting government unions, the City Council isn’t exactly Buffy the Vampire Slayer. They’re more like Igor the clueless but obedient lackey.

We are the townspeople. There are a lot more of us than there are union thugs. Individually we’re not as scary, but as a group we can bring down every elected official in the city.

Tell your city councilor to forget the union, you and your fellow taxpayers are lighting the torches.

Mayor Menino claims the 19 percent pay hike for
firemen will cause more job losses and cuts for the
City of Boston. (DNN Staff photo)




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Talking color, in black and white

O'Reilly speaks to hostile "Al Sharpton" audience


by Bill O'Reilly
DNN Staff - EXCLUSIVE!
Tuesday, Apr. 20, 2010

So there I was, speaking at a forum sponsored by Al Sharpton’s National Action Network - not exactly my core audience. But since the reverend comes on my TV program from time to time, I felt it was worthy to return the favor. Besides, I like chatting with the unconverted.

Facing a sea of skeptical faces, I told the largely left-leaning crowd that President Obama was smart to avoid racial politics. The president has consistently said he is not interested in being a “black” leader, that he wants to represent all Americans. He has rejected referencing his skin color or even mentioning most racial issues. Some black leaders have even criticized Obama for not doing enough to help African-Americans.

But I also told the crowd that some supporters of the president are playing the race card all day long. The latest example happened after Newt Gingrich told a Republican gathering that Obama may be good at basketball, but the country needs a president, not an athlete, in order to improve the job situation. That prompted NBC News correspondent Norah O’Donnell to say that the remark, the idea that blacks are good athletes, struck her as racial.

As they say at Ridgemont High: “Oh . . . my . . . God.”

Most of O’Donnell’s colleagues in the discussion gently mocked her, the exception being Jonathan Capehart, an editorial writer at The Washington Post. He, too, felt the racial “implication.”

My question is simple: Is this insane, or what?

There is no question that some Obama supporters are using a racial baton to bludgeon opponents of the president. Even though Obama has criticized that tactic, he may suffer from it. Many Americans are angry that race baiting has become a political staple. They clearly see it as an attempt to stifle robust debate.

And by crying racial wolf, important race matters may be ignored. Once everything becomes racial, then nothing is. There absolutely is racism in America, but O’Donnell has no idea what it is.

I also told Sharpton’s crowd that branding the Tea Party a racist group would be a huge mistake that could actually create racism. There already is a backlash against the Tea Party crashers. According to a new Rasmussen poll, 24 percent of Americans now align themselves with the movement, up nine points in a month.

At the end of my talk, there was a smattering of applause. A small smattering. Perhaps smattering is too strong a word. I gave it my best shot, though. You can’t fault me for trying.

Reverend Al Sharpton, shown above, making comments
to a reporter at the conclusion of the 2010 National
Action Network Convention in New York.
(DNN Staff photo)

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Dim bulbs at IRS let us eat cake

Feds soak taxpayers to renovate IRS building

by Howie Carr
DNN Staff - EXCLUSIVE!
Monday, Apr. 12, 2010

It will be a temple of taxes, a Tax Mahal, as the headline puts it. What a fitting symbol for a government run amok, and in a perfect setting too - the town of Andover, where last year 626 streetlights were turned off because the town couldn’t afford them anymore.

But now the Feds spend $92 million on the same IRS facility where they just eliminated 1,400 jobs. The Internal Revenue Service - all you need to know about Obamacare is that it will create not one single new physician or health-care provider, but it will require hiring new IRS legbreakers . . . er, make that “agents.”

The only “stimulus” this moonbat administration cares about is Big Government. Billions are sucked out of what remains of the economy’s productive sector to pay ever-more-outrageous salaries and benefits to politically correct layabouts who spend all day e-mailing one other and sharpening pencils, assuming they show up at all - a large assumption indeed.

Think of the most posh, ostentatious building in your community. Perhaps it’s the five-star resort masquerading as a state courthouse in Pemberton Square, or the federal Moakley courthouse on Northern Avenue, with its million-dollar harbor views. In the suburbs it might be one of those new $200-million high schools . . . or the IRS “campus” in Andover.

What all these buildings have in common is that they are public-sector, every one constructed with a public-be-damned attitude. Meanwhile, on Main Street, every week you drive by more empty storefronts, not to mention shuttered factories or car dealerships, and further out of town, dying or abandoned malls.

It’s like late-Medieval Europe, with giant cathedrals towering above the squalid thatched-roof hovels that housed the peasants, who were stuck with the tab for the church’s opulence. Like the bishops of old, the modern mandarins of Obama’s welfare state imperiously command us to do as they say, not as they do.

How appropriate that the overseer of this IRS chateau in Andover is Tim Geithner, the U.S. Treasury secretary, one of the many serial tax cheats in the Obama administration. Think Charles Rangel, Hilda Solis, Tom Daschle.

The private sector can’t shake this deep recession, as our bureaucratic grandees revel in unparalleled boom times. Take the Department of Transportation - please. According to USA Today, when the recession began, one DOT employee was making more than $170,000 a year. Eighteen months later, 1,690 DOT employees were earning more than $170,000. Tell me, what exactly do they do? This is not-so-stealth redistribution of wealth, not to mention reparations.

Of course we must spend $92 million in “stimulus” on an IRS playpen in a town where streetlights are now considered an extravagance. Just ask Congresswoman Niki Tsongas, another prototypical empty-pants-suit Democrat. Represents a district she didn’t even live in before she deigned to represent it in the House, and her only qualification is her last name.

Now the IRS will probably audit me. But they do it every year anyway. My crime is working for a living, and not collecting a handout. What can I say except, come and get me, coppers!

NO JOKE: A sign outside the IRS center in Andover
heralds its upcoming makeover - $92 million worth
of your tax dollars while they eliminated 1,400 jobs.
(DNN Staff photo)



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Money talks as anger grows

Government takeover looking more bigger


by Michael Graham
DNN Staff - EXCLUSIVE!
Tuesday, Apr. 6, 2010

Want to know the real reason Washington and Beacon Hill are so afraid of the Tea Party movement?

Follow the money.

If you live in Salem, follow it to one of the 45 city employees earning $100,000 a year or more - up from 34 just two years ago. The median household income in Salem is less than $60,000.

At the state level, follow it to the MBTA worker at “The Ride” - a door-to-door ride service with the noble goal of helping handicapped folks get around. But as the Boston Globe-Democrat reports, spending in just 10 years has gone up 400 percent - from $21.4 million to $84.8 million. Every time someone uses this service, Deval Patrick is digging $41 out of our pockets.

And at the national level, it’s worse. From the Wall Street Journal:

“It turns out there really is growing inequality in America. It’s the 45 percent premium in pay and benefits that government workers receive over the poor saps who create wealth in the private economy.

“And the gap is growing. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, from 1998 to 2008 public employee compensation grew by 28.6 percent, compared with 19.3 percent for private workers.”

As a result, government workers today earn about $1.45 for every dollar you earn doing the same job in an “I pay taxes and compete for customers” business. Think about it: If you earned $10,000 in wages and benefits, someone getting paid out of your taxes earned $14,500. Your $50K translates through the magic of government into their $72,500.

For the same work. No, that’s not even true, because when you go to work there’s a chance you could get fired for doing a lousy job. Those $100K Salem workers know they could pass out drunk in front of a supervisor and still be on the payroll.

And it’s driving the rest of us crazy. Listen to the tea partiers or talk radio callers and you’ll hear that their enemy isn’t a single politician like President Barack Obama or Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Their real enemy is government. And at the risk of being declared a terrorist threat - or worse, a Sarah Palin fan - I’d say the tea partiers have that target in their sights.

Nobody’s protesting the idea of everyone having health insurance. What they’re protesting is government-run health insurance, which by the way is already turning into a mess less than a week in. Companies like John Deere and AT&T are projecting huge increases in health care costs.

The government response? Haul the heads of these companies before Congress to beat them up for the sin of committing accurate Obamacare math in public. “Why can’t you just do the right thing and lie,” congressional liberals gripe.

At every turn, Obama has stepped forward on behalf of government and the people who get rich from it. With public union members earning record amounts of your money, Obama used a recess appointment this weekend to stick a radical union activist on the National Labor Relations Board.

Who were the top beneficiaries of the $860 billion (and climbing) “stimulus package”? Government workers, of course. And while the impact of Obamacare on the private sector is still being debated, everyone agrees that the more than 100 new boards, panels and commissions it creates are going to need new boarders, panelers and commissioners.

And being goodhearted, public-spirited liberals, they’ll expect to be well paid.

In this April 1, 2010 file photo, a participant in
the Tea Party rally holds a sign in Omaha, Neb.
(DNN Staff photo)

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