But taxes are also raised for all of the bond measures (that almost always benefit those in the *private* sector) that idiot voters pass without considering where the money will come from to PAY for those bonds. They are also raised when idiot citizens demand unreasonable infrastructure enhancements (again, work which benefits private contractors in almost every case) that only benefit them and their specific neighborhood/community, but everybody else has to pay for. Or when corrupt politicians collude with developers and others in the RE sector to build monuments to themselves, paying 5-10 times for a building or infrastructure improvement than what it would cost under “normal” circumstances. The list goes on and on, but you’ll only hear about unions being the problem because the MSM is being controlled by those who favor privatization and corruption.

On another note, while people keep complaining about the costs of public union workers, their compensation (and relative purchasing power) has not really gone up that much over the past few decades. The *costs* of those benefits have gone up, and the majority of those cost increases are going to those in the **private** sector. With pensions, it goes to Wall Street as the pension funds have been moving more and more toward privatizing the management of the funds and as they’ve gone into riskier investments over time (lobbied for by Wall Street). And healthcare costs have skyrocketed, with the benefits of those increases going toward healthcare/pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies. So, while the COSTS have gone up rather dramatically, the benefits to the actual public employees have not gone up nearly as much (I would definitely argue that the compensation today is about equivalent to the compensation earned in the 70s and 80s). The primary beneficiaries of these cost increases are in the PRIVATE sector. Follow the money, and you’ll see who’s really responsible for the public sector debacle…and it’s not the unions/public employees.