Kaus: Unions Are Crippling Obama

Lefty website Slate.com’s Mickey Kaus is another one of those left-of-center folks that are realizing that unions are killing Obama. Of course, I’d go one farther and say that unions are killing America, but Kaus is only worried about helping Obama. Regardless, he’s right that unions are a dangerous impediment.

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Kaus finds that the Davis-Bacon wage regulations made a joke of President Obama’s weatherization scheme, a plan that was supposed to bring jobs through his stimulus package. Because of these union-tied wage regulations, the weatherization projects that the stimulus tried to fund were so over priced and took so long to hammer out that few projects have ended up being undertaken. Yet, weatherization projects that have proceeded free of the Davis-Bacon regulations went smoothly.

As a result, the Department of Energy apparently weatherized only 22,000 homes under the program. Another pre-existing program, which doesn’t have to comply with Davis-Bacon, appears to have weatherized about 100,000 homes, if my math is right.

Kaus notes that unions caused this mess as the government spent most of the year trying to figure out how to implement the Davis-Bacon rules. (Kaus’ bold)

Instead, a year was wasted on mindless, union-demanded bureaucratic attempts to disingenuously replicate the labor market. Did Obama not know this would happen when he allowed the stimulus to be Davis-Baconized, or did he not care? [Update--Choice #3: He knows and cares, but is too weak to stand up to the unions.]

In any case, what we see here is yet another lefty that is grasping that unions are bad for us all. Mark this as another in our continuing chronicle proving that unions need to be eliminated.