We didn’t have to wait for the dreaded lame duck session for some late in the day mischief from the 111th Congress. Speaker Pelosi, as you know, called our esteemed solons back from vacation for an “emergency” session this week. The emergency: spendthrift public entities wanted to gobble up another $26 billion of our money.
Of course, it wasn’t put quite that way. We heard about the plight of teachers and firefighters, two sacrosanct professions. A Wall Street Journal editorial explains why we should be more skeptical about additional money for teachers:
Another $10 billion will disappear into an “education jobs fund,” which is meant to prevent states from laying off teachers and other public-sector employees this fall. Yet according to the Cato Institute, public school employment has risen 10 times faster since 1970 than student enrollment. There may not be another sector of the economy more in need of belt-tightening than public education.
Here’s another reason we should let states pay for their own overspending:
We argued during last year’s debate that the stimulus was a pretext for a huge permanent entitlement expansion, and what do you know. Thirty states had actually built the presumption of Congress extending this “matching rate” into their fiscal 2011 budgets, even though it was due to expire on paper. Democrats are rewarding states for making unaffordable health-care promises and handing Governors even more incentive to do so: The more they spend, the more political pressure Congress will feel to come to the rescue.
Somebody has got to make the case to the public for high unemployment-in the public sector.