Government Unions Foster Uncontrolled Spending

Meanwhile, Big Labor Academics Claim Government Is ‘Starving’

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the number of taxpayer-funded employees on the payrolls of government K-12 schools nationwide increased by 614,000 from 2012 to 2022, the most recent year for which such data are available. Over that same decade, NCES data show the number of children enrolled in government K-12 schools fell by nearly 153,000.  

The number of government employees on K-12 public school payrolls is swelling even in the states with the greatest enrollment declines, which are typically also the states where government union officials wield the most clout. 

American Taxpayers Now Hand Nearly a Trillion Dollars a Year to Government Schools 

In Big Labor-dominated California, for example, where 54% of civil servants are unionized, compared to 36% nationwide, government K-12 payrolls surged by 71,000 between 2012 and 2022, even as enrollment fell by 369,000. In union-label New York State, where 67% of public employees are unionized, taxpayer-funded school staff grew by 61,000, while student enrollment dropped by 178,000. 

Not surprisingly, the cost to taxpayers for government schools has increased steeply in conjunction with this staffing surge. 

From FY 2012 to FY 2022, U.S. Census Bureau data show per pupil expenditures for elementary-secondary school systems skyrocketed by 47%. 

By any reasonable standard, the nearly one trillion dollars a year in federal, state and local taxpayer money the U.S. now forks over to school fewer K-12 students than it did a decade or so ago constitutes a huge and rapidly growing investment, on which it is getting a return that is mediocre at best. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to government spending trends, vast numbers of elected officials and political operatives across the country have adopted a completely unreasonable mode of thinking. It was expressed succinctly at the end of February in a paper coauthored by Obama Administration veteran Heidi Shierholz and far-left academic Josh Bivens for the union-label Economic Policy Institute (EPI). 

According to Drs. Shierholz and Bivens, state and local governments, whose collective spending soared by 62% from 2015 to 2025 (26 percentage points above CPI inflation!), to reach nearly $4.4 trillion per year, are being “starved”! 

John Kalb, vice president of the National Right to Work Committee, explained: “The EPI coauthors reach this outlandish conclusion by making implicit assumptions they couldn’t possibly defend if they were made explicit. 

“For example, nationwide enrollment in K-12 government schools is falling, and in a number of states it is falling substantially. This is happening in part because American birth rates have been in a downward trend for nearly two decades, but primarily because more and more parents, having lost all confidence in Big Labor-dominated government education, are now opting to homeschool their children or send them to private schools.

“When enrollments decline, but inflation-adjusted government school budgets do not, real per pupil spending increases. But according to the EPI writers’ loopy logic, spending doesn’t increase, because they assume government school spending should grow at least as much as the overall economy does, even if enrollments are falling.” 

Big Labor ‘Think Tank’s’ Lunacy Cited to Justify Union-Boss Power Grabs 

Mr. Kalb continued: 

“This lunacy would not matter much, except the EPI’s fallacious arguments are often used to justify the adoption and retention of special-interest laws that empower government union bosses who are not accountable to the public to codetermine with public officials how civil servants are compensated and managed.” 

Virginia is a current case in point, he noted. This year, government union lobbyists eagerly cited the “findings” of EPI propagandists to justify their quest to secure enactment of a state law mandating union monopoly bargaining over the compensation and work rules of roughly 500,000 front-line civil servants. 

Effectively, the EPI case for mandatory union monopoly bargaining in Virginia is that government spending and taxes in the Commonwealth are currently far too low, and additional legal privileges for unions are needed to push them ever upward. 

If Democrat Gov. Abigail Spanberger signs mandatory monopoly-bargaining legislation into law, as she may well have done by the time this Newsletter reaches its readers in the mail, she will demonstrate that the EPI goal is her goal! 

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