Public v. Private employees

I'm truly fascinated with the new war on unions and the middle class being waged by the tea partiers. First, I must say I agree that some localities have probably made it too easy for police types to take retirement with full benefits and health care after 20 years, then allow the person to retire and take a similar job and work toward a second retirement while receiving the first.
Having said that, I must note that in Wisconsin, the police and fire unions are exempted from the governor 's plan, so the war against unions is against teachers and other state employees.
After our local paper, the Courier Journal, published a letter and an op-ed piece last week, both of which stated as fact that public employees earn more than their private counterparts, I wrote the paper asking whether they believed those statements were true. (I blogged about this new tea party meme last November when I first saw the assertion, I think under the caption "Why are the public employees ripping us off?).
But of course, the newspaper can no longer be expected to give us facts because the new mission is to report both sides of every story (sometimes the truth and the lie, without telling us which is which, otherwise, they could be accused of taking sides).
I happen to believe what has happened over the years is that public employees made LESS in salary than their private counterparts (with similar educational levels) and their pensions fairly mirrored those of private 401K's. Private workers were happy with this arrangement until their 401k's tanked and pensions didn't. Then, once they became infected with tea partyism, they saw that someone was getting something they weren't and it made them unhappy.
Now, some people would look at why the 401k's tanked and get mad at Wall Street, but in tea partyland they got mad at other middle-classers instead! And, once again, its worked out well for the Republicans, once you are able to overlook the complete insanity of it all.
Jon Stewart had a bit on the Fox News pundits' total hypocrisy of it all when compared to their position of the banker's bonuses during the financial bailout. With bankers, we need to respect the sanctity of their contracts (they were promised the bonuses), but with public workers, not so much.
Here's a link to Jon Stewart via Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/04/jon-stewart-teachers-walls-street-fox_n_831243.html
Here are links to a couple of articles about comparisons between public and private workers, with thanks to the work of the Nobel Prize winning economist, Paul Krugman and the NYT:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/the-truth-about-pensions/?emc=eta1
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/a-clarification-on-public-workers/?emc=eta1

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/03/06/us/public-private-employees.html?hp

One thing that you have to admire is the ability of the Republican Party to turn one section of the middle class against another, when neither had anything to do with the financial meltdown. Why middle class people are content to attack each other instead of going after the real perpetrators of our problems is totally beyond me.
My hat is off to those workers in Wisconsin who are fighting back against this nonsense, and we should all be supporting them.