Having actually been a public employee for 18 years, in two separate municipalities, I can testify with some authority that their benefits are not that extreme. For starters, they used to be quite similar to large corporate benefit plans, before those started to deteriorate. On top of that, the salaries were much lower than for comparable jobs in the private sector. The story was that you made up for the low salaries by good benefits and "job security". Well, govvie salaries are now on a par with the private sector, but not because they have risen, but because the private sector pay has gone down.

Of course, job security was quickly compromised, because you had to sign away your civil service rights the moment you accepted a promotion. Unless you were willing to stay at the very bottom of the responsibility hierarchy, you lost your job security, too. In my shop, only the old employees had civil service, new hires haven't had that since I started there almost two decades ago. I came in as a manager, I never had job security. Everybody works "at the pleasure of the commission". That means they can fire you any time they want, for just cause. If they don't have a just cause, they can lay you off indefinitely. Either way, you're fucked. Middle aged people don't get hired in this economy.

If economic conditions force a cutback in job amenities, I can accept that. But I am really pissed off at the attempt to blame public employees for the erosion of salaries and benefits in the private sector. That is just a cynical attempt to pit one group of workers against another, the old divide and conquer technique.

And unions. We had a union where I worked, but in a right to work state you didn't have to join it and pay dues, so it had no power. The blue collar types joined up, because they knew how important it was. The white collar workers learned that lesson too late.

Fortunately, the State of Florida handled our pension plan, and now that that is under attack in the state legislature, I'm very lucky I got out when I did.If I had waited until I was 65 for normal retirement, I might not have had one. The same calculation was valid for Social Security.

Yeah, I know times are tough, money is short, and we all have to tighten our belts, but the answer is not to simply destroy all these benefits that made middle class life possible for the working man. I don't doubt benefit programs could be better managed, or cut back in a disciplined and measured way. But simply throwing them away is not the answer. We don't want to redistribute the wealth, we want to redistribute the sacrifice.