The simple fact of the matter is that teachers unions are pure government waste and wholly corrupt. As this fight between public employees as focused on teachers unions in Wisconsin continues to heat up, we are finding more and more instances to prove that these unions are rotten to the core.

In Wisconsin, for instance, we find that these protesting teachers might be costing the taxpayers up to nine million dollars. As they skip out on their actual jobs teaching Wisconsin’s children, as their actions begin to cost the districts more in expenses, and as they have somehow wrangled themselves to get paid even as they play hookey the costs to the taxpayers mount.

In New York teachers unions have strong-armed the Empire State into paying the salaries of 1,500 teachers who are not teaching but are instead conducting union business. Worse, the state has hired a corresponding number of teachers to do the duties of those doing union business on the taxpayer’s dime because the first 1,500 are not in the classroom. This is a monumental waste of tax money all because unions have been successful in having their buddies at the state capitol pass union favorable rules for the campaign cash they’ve been given. The voters have no say.

Also in New York, teachers that are known as child molesters cannot be fired due to the impossible demands that unions put on cases of dismissal.

Similarly in LA teachers that have been found to be bad teachers and in some cases even criminals cannot be fired because the unions have put such heavy demands on districts to prove malfeasance that it costs less for the districts to continue paying these bad teachers than it does to invest the money and time to fire them.

In many big cities across the country bad teachers are paid not to teach and placed in a “jobs bank” (often called “the rubber room”) where they sit and do nothing for years all the while getting paid a full salary and benefits. All of this is because unions have made it impossible to fire bad teachers.

As Michael Barone says, these public employees unions are pure graft and waste.

Follow the money, Washington reporters like to say. The money in this case comes from taxpayers, present and future, who are the source of every penny of dues paid to public employee unions, who in turn spend much of that money on politics, almost all of it for Democrats. In effect, public employee unions are a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party.

So, as these union fatcats get rich, avoid doing their jobs, and can even commit crimes and stay on our tab, we are all forced to pay their way.

Public employee unions must be eliminated.