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Sold out: Lawmakers abandon taxpayers

By: Jim Paxton

Of many recent affronts to taxpayers by Kentucky 's lawmakers, the travesty that has recently played out in Frankfort is surely the pinnacle.

During a special session in October, the legislature poured roughly $200 million in additional taxpayer dollars – about $160 million more than the amount originally proposed by Gov. Ernie Fletcher – into a health insurance sop for state employees. This brings the one-year cost of the employee health insurance program to $700 million.

Do the math. That's an increase in the bill to the taxpayers of 40 percent in one year.

That simply puts the exclamation mark on this reality: Kentucky’s is a government by the government, of the government, and for the government. The taxpayers are its servants. Of course in a democracy, theoretically, it is supposed to be the other way around.

And that is just the point. Our lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans alike, long ago lost sight of whom it is they are elected to serve. Many of them have simply been in Frankfort too long, and the only thing likely to alter this mindset is wholesale change. Fortunately, an opportunity presents itself.

It is like a little D.C. Beltway. Too many of our lawmakers remain locked in the 1950s mindset that the way to get elected and stay elected is to get tight with the local courthouse folks and do whatever it takes to keep the teachers' union and state employees’ lobby happy. They quake before the liberal editorial pages of the state’s metropolitan newspapers, not understanding that the days of reach and influence of “state newspapers” are here and everywhere a relic of the economic past. They forget that the big-government religion those publications espouse is directly at odds with the views of the vast majority of those people at home whom lawmakers are supposed to serve.

Yes, we will concede that teachers and state employees by and large have challenging jobs and often feel unappreciated. But guess what. So do most of the taxpayers.

Kentucky and much of the rest of the nation has these past few years endured a very tough economy, marked not only by layoffs, wage freezes and limited hiring, but several consecutive years of double-digit increases in the cost of health insurance combined with significantly increased deductibles, co-pays, and maximum out-of-pocket costs (and don't forget, employers, many of whom pay two-thirds or more of the total employee premium, have had to deal with like increases on their side of the desk).

However, teachers and state employees have largely been insulated from this reality. State government purred happily along during the last recession, maintaining benefits, handing out across-the-board raises, foregoing layoffs, and even revising upward the entry level pay of many state positions; this at a time when growing numbers of taxpayers were standing in the unemployment line.

And the reality is the taxpayers were not only paying the costs of their own soaring health coverage, they also were paying to underwrite the cost of the state's very generous health insurance program for its employees.

The spiraling cost of health insurance is an equal-opportunity crisis. We’re all in it together; or at least we should be.

We suggest that teachers will ultimately find themselves tarnished by the unfortunate conduct of their leadership. The shameful display by their representatives at the governor's appearance at Kentucky Dam Village (one Sun employee related the remarks of a 10-year-old watching the episode on TV: “Dad, if we acted like that at school, we’d be in real trouble”) obviously was not helpful. But their threat to throw a statewide temper tantrum by conducting an illegal strike if they do not get what they want is something we know is widely resented by taxpayers in our region. It will come back to haunt them.

But the real disappointment is that Gov. Fletcher, who had the moral high ground as far as the taxpayers were concerned, caved in to this display. We believe he owed the taxpayers the courage to stand up for them by saying that any teacher who participated in an illegal strike would be summarily terminated, but would be free to re-apply for their jobs should they decide the pay and benefits were not so bad after all.

The governor failed us, and next thing you know, our “professional, full-time legislature” – you know, the same bunch that couldn't bring itself to pass a budget in either of the last two budget sessions; the same bunch that illegally tried to double its pension in a midnight vote and then came home protesting to the taxpayers “we didn't know what we were voting for”; the same bunch that appealed all the way to the Kentucky Supreme Court – and lost – after the pension scam was struck down – that bunch ran up to Frankfort for a $500,000 election eve special session and in a blessed display of new-found bi-partisanship, betrayed the electorate again.

It's that old 1950s mindset – keep the teachers' union and state employees happy and we’ll all get re-elected.

We don’t think so. Not this time. We think lawmakers this time have put their necks squarely in the noose and the trap door swings open in a couple of weeks. Candidly, we can’t wait.

– This was originally an editorial published in the Paducah Sun on October 17, 2004 by its publisher,Jim Paxton, who can be reached at       jpaxton@paducahsun.com 

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