A couple of weeks ago Jonathon Cohn had a good piece on Republican efforts to make "public employees the new welfare queens."
This is an item about why your local fireman or teacher has such a nice retirement package, why you probably don’t, and the way conservatives are using that contrast to advance their broader economic agenda....
Conservatives say that excessive public employee pensions exemplify the greed of unions (which sought these generous benefits for public employees) and inefficiency of government (which agreed to pay them). If local and state governments are struggling financially, these conservatives say, they should figure out some way to reduce or revoke those promised benefits, rather than come to Washington and beg for help from the taxpayers....
While raw statistics show that public employees get more compensation than private employees doing comparable work, research that adjusts for variables like education has suggested otherwise. Earlier this year, a study with such adjustments by economists Keith Bender and John Heywood concluded that compensation for local and state workers was, on average, 6.8 to 7.4 percent lower than compensation for comparable private sector workers.
Also, as Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research points out, many public employees don’t get Social Security. Overall, he says, “most public sector pensions do not provide retirees with an especially high standard of living.” Exceptions to this rule frequently include firefighters and police, particularly in New York. Then again, they risk their lives to protect the rest of us from lethal threats, which is more than you can say for CEOs like the former telecom executive who in 2007 retired with a $159 million benefit package.
This is just one aspect of the Republican war against government--it's a war against the middle class jobs that government creates, as if the dollars that public employees contribute to the economy, including the payroll taxes they pay along with everyone else, aren't equivalent to private sector dollars.
Taken to the extreme by--who else, Michele Bachman, Sharron Angle, and now Steve King that fight encompasses state aid, which they call money laundering.
It's also worth noting that this meme is of a piece with a campaign on the right to demonize public employees, and to get Americans to scapegoat them for their economic problems. The other day, Rush Limbaugh denounced public employees as "leftist" and "socialist," railing: "They want you to pay more taxes so they can continue in their freeloader gigs."
The larger trend here is that the likes of Bachmann and Angle -- willingly feeding the Tea Party base's most fevered hallucinations on a daily basis -- now routinely hint that everything Dems do must of necessity be nefarious, even vaguely criminal. Public employees, needless to say, are willing pawns in the Dems' criminal enterprise.
Which makes teaching your kids, policing the streets, putting out house fires "money-laundering." Bachman and Angle and King, might be taking it to 11 on the crazy meter, but it's really just an extension of standard GOP fare. Boehner might call public employees "special interests" instead of "freeloaders" but it's not a great leap between the two concepts. And it's just more of their war against the middle class.