Monday, February 16, 2009

Rep. Lance Horbach highlights union payoff's harm to rural Iowa


Representative Lance Horbach (R HD 40) raised another very well made objection to the Prevailing Wage bill. Rep. Horbach’s interview in today’s DMR webpage is must reading for those Republicans who oppose the union payoff and for anyone else (which means 90% of Iowa’s employees) who isn’t getting the big union payoff from the Culver/Murphy/Gronstal/McCarthy crew.

For those of you who don’t know, the Prevailing Wage bill requires all public entities to pay the prevailing union wages for all construction projects in Iowa. Even the Democrats admit that this mandatory pay scale will increase the cost of public works by 10%-15%.

At first glance the bill looks like, well, a big payoff to for the special interests of the labor bosses that are politically indistinguishable from the Democrats who are presently so mismanaging Iowa’s faltering economy.

We here in the shadow of the Golden Dome often think only in terms of the astronomical cost that the big union payoff will cost us. Rep. Horbach’s commentary in this morning’s Des Moines Register illustrates another problem-the rural government or school board that can neither afford to pay union wages for its projects being unable to employ local contractors who also cannot afford to pay union wages.

If the advantages of union labor are cost beneficial then every governmental entity certainly has the right to employ union labor. Republicans don’t oppose such a basic principle of market place economics, but then the Democrats and their union bosses don’t want choice, they want only to mandate a guaranteed market for union labor regardless of its cost benefit to the taxpayers who pay the grossly inflated union rates.

Rep. Horbach highlights one such constituency-everyone in Iowa’s 88 rural counties at whose expense the union payoff is made. Stay tuned, our pages will reflect more such constituencies who will be soaked for the union payoff.

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