The Relationship between Union Membership and State Budget Deficits

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Contrary to Walker's assertion, there is no direct correlation between public-sector collective bargaining and yawning state budget deficits. According to data gathered by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, while Wisconsin projects a state budget deficit of 12.8 percent for FY 2012, North Carolina, which does not allow government workers to bargain, faces a significantly higher deficit: 20 percent.

That is from Joseph McCartin's piece in The New Republic on the current battle in Wisconsin. I wanted to look at the relationship between unions and deficits more systematically. Like McCartin I used the CBPP data on budget deficits, although I focused not on the projected 2012 deficits but on the 2011 deficits (see Table 4 of the report). I do not know of readily available data on public-sector collective bargaining or on public-sector union strength, so I used the percent of employed people who are members of unions (from this BLS report).

Here is the graph, with a non-linear fit line estimated via lowess.

There is not much of a systematic relationship. The fit line bumps and wiggles but is essentially flat. The bivariate correlation is 0.19, with a p-value of 0.21. Based on these measures, states with larger unionized workforces do not have larger budget deficits.

http://www.themonkeycage.org/2011/02/the_relationship_between_union.html

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It's all relative to what the state budget is/what they spend their money on. It's very subjective.

The fact of the matter is though, is that a group of people shouldn't be able to hold another group of people hostage for more money just because they feel they deserve it. Taxpayer dollars should never be used in such a wreckless manner, especially by Government.

Of course the precious liberals all want taxes raised anyway. Stupidity owns their soul in the idea that raising taxes will solve problems. The truth is, Government is full of a bunch of dumb monkeys who think just because they have more money, that they need to spend that money.