AlterNet: Right-Wingers Using Public Employees as 21st-Century Welfare Queens

[marmar]

The nation’s public employees educate our kids, fight our fires, make sure our food isn’t tainted with toxic crap, provide services to the neediest and perform a thousand other vital tasks the private sector has no incentive to do. They earn less, on average, than their private-sector counterparts with similar qualifications. None become billionaires.

But the government doesn’t engage in the kind of ruthless and relentless union-busting that corporate America has employed to make it virtually impossible for private sector workers to organize. That explains, in part, why public workers toil in the last sector of the U.S. economy where employees enjoy some job security, decent health care and the prospect of a dignified retirement.

Now, the corporate Right has public sector workers in its cross-hairs. A viral email making the rounds in Tea Party circles sums up the charge, describing a dark conspiracy among “stinking, filthy libs” to use masses of sallow government bureaucrats to undermine America’s “capitalistic, independent, rugged individualists and entrepreneurs”:

(Government workers) are supported 100% by the American taxpayers employed in the private profit producing sector . None of the gov. offices produce one red cent in profit--they are all parasites. Every 100 gainfully employed American tax payers supports 6.5 gov. employees 100% (sic).

Jonathan Cohn, writing in the New Republic, calls public employees, “the new welfare queens,” an easy target for the Right’s politics of resentment. And the comparison is apt. Just as there were no doubt a few welfare recipients gaming the system and living the high-life, a very small number of public sector employees -- mostly the cops and firefighters to whom politicos don’t dare say no -- have won lavish retirement packages. That small group of rather specialized workers is being held up as an example of both the perfidy of “big government” and the unbridled greed of public-sector unions. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/economy/148633/right-wingers_using_public_employees_as_21st-century_welfare_queens_/

[RKP5637]

1. Recommend!!! n/t

[pnorman]

2. "None of the gov. offices produce one red cent in profit--they are all parasites"

So if thy don't produce any profit, they're "parasites"????? WEIRD LOGIC!

[cynzke]

3. Corporate Myth!

This is a myth that the secret corporate influences behind the tea baggers are feeding them. It isn't about "over-paid government employees"! Its about killing government agencies so that corporations can get their hands in the taxpayers cookie jar. Outsource government services to private corporations like Halliburton. Privatize as much of government services as possible. And we will pay much more for these services then we do now.

[wisteria]

4. Ugly. It frightens me the direction this country is headed in if Repubs get their power back.

[ck4829]

5. Teabagger math fail

"Every 100 gainfully employed American tax payers supports 6.5 gov. employees 100% (sic)."

What exactly is wrong with that?

Ah, they made the math scary. If you break it down, then every taxpayer pays for a little more than half the salary of 1 public employee.

Ooh, scary. (:sarcasm:)