For Beshear, lessons from Richard Nixon

A story and a speech this morning made me think about "Nixon going to China."

That's a reference to an historic event with a broad lesson: Significant policy change often takes leadership from a politician taking an unexpected position. The classic example is President Nixon's trip to China after decades of being a vocal opponent of Red China. Nixon made it palatable for other Republicans to shift their views.

Kentucky Gov.-elect Steve Beshear can help the state move forward by adopting that kind of approach to some issues that involve organized labor, both public and private sector.

State Senate President David Williams, a Republican, was in Wilder today talking to a Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce group about how public employee pension costs are an exploding problem for counties, cities and school districts across the state. No one is talking about reducing benefits for current workers, but let's agree that it's crazy that a state trooper could retire after 20 years at age 41 and have full medical benefits at no cost to himself for the rest of his life. No private sector employer can sustain these expenses. According to Williams, the pension fund will have a zero balance by 2022. That's a far-worse scenario than Social Security faces.

Beshear has pledged to deal with this problem. It only can be solved in a bipartisan way that will involve a credible Democrat working with the public employee unions.

The governor also appears to be inheriting a miserable budget situation -- far worse than the surplus outgoing Gov. Fletcher bragged about. Oh, that was before the election. (Over at Pat Crowley's blog today, there is an item about even bigger shortfalls facing Kentucky.)

One obvious way to reduce costs to taxpayers is to repeal all or part of prevailing wage law, which forces government to spend more on construction projects than a private sector developer would have to pay. For example, use a figure of $60 million or more just for projects needed at Northern Kentucky University. If NKU weren't a public institution, it could spend at least $6 million to $10 million less on these projects.

No one likes to see good workers make less money, but I have never been able to understand why wage rates should be higher just because the government signs the checks. The fear is that substandard work would result, but there are lots of other rules and laws governing construction quality, not to mention lawsuit threats. And what contractor would want to be known as the builder of, say, substandard school buildings?

There has been some political talk about at least rescinding prevailing wage for school construction. What a huge help that would be in resource-strapped Boone County, which has to build the equivalent of a new school every year to deal with growth.

Only leadership from a Democratic governor can make reform in prevailing wage happen. I can't think of anything else that would stretch dollars more or save the taxpayers so much, so fast.