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Crooks and Liars
December 15, 2010 11:00 AM
Credit: Economic Policy Institute
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Move over, welfare queens, IRS agents and trial lawyers. The Republican Party has a new bogeyman: the public employee. With a sluggish U.S. economy, cash-strapped states and under-funded pension programs, Tim Pawlenty, Sarah Palin and other leading lights of the GOP are scape-goating government workers and their unions for the nation's woes. Of course, there's only one problem with Rush Limbaugh's claim that public sector employees are "freeloaders" and the charge from Indiana Governor and GOP White House hopeful Mitch Daniels that they are a "new privileged class in America."
Like so much other conservative mythmaking, it's simply not true.
But that didn't stop outgoing Minnesota Governor and 2012 Republican presidential contender Tim Pawlenty this week from pretending otherwise. In a Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "Government Unions vs. Taxpayers," Governor Pawlenty echoed half-term Governor Sarah Palin by targeting "unionized public employees [who] are making more money, receiving more generous benefits, and enjoying greater job security than the working families forced to pay for it with ever-higher taxes, deficits and debt."
How did this happen? Very quietly. The rise of government unions has been like a silent coup, an inside job engineered by self-interested politicians and fueled by campaign contributions.
Pawlenty repeated his charge to Fox News on Monday:
"You have public employees making more than their private-sector counterparts. They used to be under-benefited and underpaid. Now they're both over-benefited and overpaid...it needs to stop."
Sadly for would-be President Pawlenty, the charge - whether at the federal, state or local level - is false.
That's the conclusion of a recent study by the Economic Policy Institute. Just one of many recent analyses debunking Republican charges about government workers and their unions, EPI found that "on average, state and local government workers are compensated 3.75% less than workers in the private sector." (See the table above for details.) The report by Labor and Employment Relations Professor Jeffrey Keefe of Rutgers University revealed that public employees are undercompensated compared to similarly skilled private sector counterparts:
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