SOURCE:
THE AMERICAN SPECTATORURL:
https://spectator.org/revolt-of-the-california-freeloaders/by STEVEN GREENHUT
When normal people talk about “freeloaders,” they usually are referring to the assorted welfare dependents, scammers and, yes, public employees who game the system to do as little productive work as possible and receive as many taxpayer-supplied benefits as they can muster. In California, freeloading is an art form, but the term is largely verboten. We don’t want to be accused of insensitivity or other retrograde attitudes, after all.
So I guess we can thank Gov. Jerry Brown for making it OK to speak directly about these folks. During a speech earlier this month in Orange County, the governor made his disgust clear. “The freeloaders — I’ve had enough of them,” he said, according to an Orange County Register report. Brown was there defending a new law he signed that raises fuel taxes by 12 cents to 19 cents a gallon, and annual vehicle-license fees by as much as $180 a vehicle.
I scanned the story without pausing, given how typical it is for Brown to use colorful rhetoric. (This is a governor who refers to critics of his climate-change agenda as “troglodytes,” warns of human extinction, and chides opponents of his $68-billion bullet train as “declinists who want to put their head in a hole….”) But kudos to Kira Davis at the Red State blog for catching the significance of his latest tirade.
“
If you live in California, have a job and pay taxes Governor Jerry Brown would like you to know that you’re a freeloader and he’s tired of your complaining,” Davis wrote. This isn’t much of an overstatement. If one looks closely at the rest of the Brown quotation, it’s clear who he’s talking about. “They have a president that doesn’t tell the truth and they’re following suit,” he said, as he criticized activists working to recall a freshman Democratic senator from Fullerton who cast a deciding vote in favor of the recent tax hike.
The recall effort has gotten under the Democratic leadership’s skin, and for good reason: It’s likely to succeed and it will cost Democrats their supermajority in the Senate if it does. Without a supermajority, it’s a tougher process for the majority party to pursue its favorite pastime: raising taxes on the people they view as freeloaders. You know the drill. If California taxpayers and employers get to keep more of our own money, we’re being selfish.
Meanwhile, as I documented in my recent Spectator column, the San Jose police sergeant who, say, grabbed a $552,000 compensation package, Oakland city engineer who quadrupled his salary by racking up $299,000 in overtime last year alone, and six police and fire officials who walked away with $1 million payouts on top of their already generous pensions apparently are heroes devoted to public service. So, too, are the government workers and politicians who have driven the state’s unfunded pension liabilities (i.e., debt) to $1 trillion, based on some credible estimates.
Brown — in his revised May budget released last week —
has decided to double the state’s payments to the pension funds to help reduce escalating debt levels. Brown has come up with a clever way to get that extra money. He’s borrowing it at low interest rates from the state’s Surplus Money Investment Fund and pre-paying the pension debt. It’s the same thing that consumers do when they pay off one high-interest credit card with a lower-interest loan.
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