Unions force taxpayers to fund the Democrats

Earlier today I was on the Thom Hartmann radio show to discuss Wisconsin, and Mr. Hartmann just couldn’t get his head around the fact that any working person would oppose unions. Well, aside from the powerful right to work issue, and aside from the fact that what’s being discussed in Wisconsin is government unions (as opposed to private sector unions) here’s a very good reason to oppose public sector unions.

[Obama] did find time to be interviewed by a Wisconsin television station and weigh in on the dispute between Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the state’s public employee unions. Walker was staging “an assault on unions,” he said, and added that “public employee unions make enormous contributions to our states and our citizens.”

Enormous contributions, yes — to the Democratic Party and the Obama campaign. Unions, most of whose members are public employees, gave Democrats some $400 million in the 2008 election cycle. The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the biggest public employee union, gave Democrats $90 million in the 2010 cycle.

Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.

There is no analog on the GOP side, forcing taxpayers to fund political parties they oppose. Taxpayers are funding the ongoing union assault on their own state governments, whether they want to or not. That is patently unfair to the taxpayer. Public sector unions should never have been allowed to exist in the first place, but if they’re allowed to exist, they must be removed from the political process entirely. Their dues-to-Democrats-to-union-benefits scheme is a massive form of public corruption.