Dear State Legislators,
Don’t do it. Don’t sign off on the new contract Governor Newsom has negotiated with Unit 6. It’s another giveaway to a powerful special interest — Corrections employees — that already collects gobs of money that could be used elsewhere. 55,000 employees already collecting more than $5 billion per year in salary and costing billions more in unfunded retirement costs for attending to just 100,000 inmates is bad enough.
To be clear, we are not anti-spending, just anti-unnecessary-spending-in-favor-of-special-interests. We are very pleased to see Medi-Cal extended to more residents and child care expanded (assuming that, like Medicare and Medi-Cal, child care customers get to choose providers), though we would much rather see you fund those programs with savings from eliminating unnecessary spending in favor of special interests (such as retiree health subsidies made increasingly irrelevant because of federal funding via Obamacare), especially in a world in which you have decided to reserve only one-quarter of the revenue loss that will happen when markets next take a 2001 tumble and schools are already under-reserved.
Just say no.
