Live from Music Row Friday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.
CROM CARMICHAEL:
Michael, we had this terrible kerfuffle at the State Legislature that was all organized and planned. And then you have the Trump indictment. You have the Biden administration, essentially stiff-arming Republicans in Washington on reducing spending. And you have to ask.
We get into this question of a simple versus a complex problem. And what we’re dealing with is a complex problem in the sense that you have to understand the root cause of the problem. And I have maintained that the root cause is government employee unions.
I’m going to expand that and include private sector unions as well because the government is trying to use the government to expand private sector unions essentially by the use of government force. And so I say, what’s your evidence of that? And so here’s a little evidence that in this time of spending deficits that are literally unprecedented because now they’re normal. In other words, when I say normal, they’re now regular.
They’re not in response to a particular event. They’re now baked in a $1.5 trillion deficit that will climb to $2 trillion, which is unsustainable and the country will collapse. We’re seeing other countries sign agreements with China to trade with them in the Chinese currency and to eliminate the dollar.
But in Biden’s budget, he’s trying to add 82,000 federal employees. Eight-two thousand. Now what that does is each federal employee pays union dues of about a thousand dollars, the ones that are in unions, which is a very large percentage.
And so that’s $82 million of union dues that are taken from the taxpayers and given to government employee unions. Government employees at the federal level, make an average salary of $90,500 a year. The average annual wage for people in the private sector is $56,000.
And that doesn’t include benefits. The healthcare benefits of federal employees are gold-plated, and the retirement benefits for federal employees are gold-plated, and vacation and sick day benefits are gold-plated.
And so what we have now is we have a growing two-tier, two different countries in terms of who benefits from the productive work of our country and who doesn’t. And it’s government employees and those associated with the government that is benefiting, and everybody else is losing.
And therein lies the angst. Now you have the Left is now crossing the second Rubicon. I didn’t know there was a second. There may be a third out there somewhere, in arresting not only a former president on stupid charges but also a current nominee, a current person running for president.
I talked to a friend of mine who’s very bright, and we were discussing these things and I was explaining what I think needs to be done to try to right the ship and make sure that everybody is treated equally, which means that the other side needs to be treated badly if Republicans getting power.
When I say badly, I don’t mean roughed up or thrown in jail. I just simply mean that those people who want a bigger government ought to be the ones who are audited and who ought to pay for it unless the other side can come to terms with the fact that our country is just completely out of kilter from a financial standpoint and a value standpoint and can come to terms with legislation.
And so underpinning all of these problems that we see on TV are the bureaucratic state and the power of the bureaucratic state now that it is as big as it is. And so that will be the thing that will need to have to be addressed, and it needs to be discussed.
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this Crommentary:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
Photo “U.S. Capitol” by Alejandro Barba.
