I first started reading Michael Barone when I subscribed to U.S. News and World Report back in the 80"s.  Always appreciated the succinctness of his analysis. As the years progressed he has become known both for his encyclopedic knowledge of politics and in the particular the machinations of the electoral process.  You want to find out the handicap on any district or candidate Barones the guy.

His current post in the Washington Examiner is headlined Public-sector Unions Bleeding Taxpayers 
I said it's a headline, not that it's news.

some interesting points:

But union membership is still growing in the public sector. Last year 37.4 percent of public-sector employees were union members. That percentage was down near zero in the 1950s. For the first time in history, a majority of union members are government employees.

Why, you may ask, is this a problem?   Don't mean to insult your intelligence by belaboring the obvious but try this on for size

Public-sector unionism is a very different animal from private-sector unionism. It is not adversarial but collusive. Public-sector unions strive to elect their management, which in turn can extract money from taxpayers to increase wages and benefits -- and can promise pensions that future taxpayers will have to fund.

Really?  Would the Chicagobama spoils system really be so audacious and blatant, ya think?  Barone divulges some numbers resulting from the stimulus plan:

While the private sector has lost 7 million jobs, the number of public-sector jobs has risen. The number of federal government jobs has been increasing by 10,000 a month, and the percentage of federal employees earning over $100,000 has jumped to 19 percent during the recession.

As I implied, to us news junkies none of this is really, you know, news.  But when somebody like Barone fleshes it out with actual numbers it becomes much more powerful and, one hopes, will alert more people.  Enter the Tea Party movement.

This is a good companion piece to the Dr Zero column on privatization. The longer we let government manage anything through tax confiscation and regulatory coercion that the private sector can provide more efficiently through fair and open competition the more we delay fiscal sustainability.