Government Fat Cat
As President Obama talks about dealing with waste – after three years of wasteful spending – we have new sites popping up every day to reveal the wasteful spending in government. Waste in government is one of the reasons why government must not be allowed to grow beyond what is needed. The following site has a new way of bringing the point home. You won’t believe it – it’s easy to read and worth checking out. Read here: Dirty spending secrets
As if that isn’t enough, the Heritage Foundation is reporting that the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO have joined forces to spend even more taxpayer money. One might ask how a far left group and a conservative group could join together at a time when the country is going bankrupt. One must remember that the Chamber is not a conservative group – it’s a business group – that makes the alliance more understandable.
Heritage reports: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO do not agree on much. But they have joined forces to persuade Congress to spend more on infrastructure…The Chamber has no principled opposition to government spending. It happily lobbies for government spending—such as the stimulus—when that spending goes to its members. Many corporations in the Chamber build infrastructure or the machines necessary to build infrastructure. The president of Caterpiller, for example, sits on the Chamber’s board of directors. The more Congress spends on transportation projects, the more these companies profit—whether or not those projects provide value to the taxpayer.
The union movement also gains from federal construction spending. Union density has plummeted to just 13 percent of the construction industry. Unionized companies have proven unable to compete with more efficient nonunion operations. However, unions do not have to worry about nonunion competition for federal projects. The Davis-Bacon Act requires federal contractors to pay the “prevailing” wage. Thanks to flaws in how the Department of Labor estimates these prevailing wages they usually wind up being union rates and require union job classifications. So all federal contractors must accept the same high costs and inefficient work rules unionized firms do. This requirement cost taxpayers an extra $11 billion this year… Read here: Ilicit relationship
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