Policy Director and Chief International Economist at the AFL-CIO, Thea Lee alluded to more socialist talking points yesterday morning on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.
Instead of answering Wallace’s inquiry on why the average taxpayer should fund lavish government pensions and benefits, she stuck to her talking points, saying, “… we have to turn the question around. It’s not so much why do some people have a pension and others not, how do we take away the pension from the people who have it. That’s un- American. I think we need to figure out how do we make sure that everybody in America has a decent pension. This is a wealthy country.”
Lee tried to explain that public sector employees were not overpaid because they don’t always get the lavish benefits and salaries to which Wallace was alluding.
“But some public sector work[ers] have chosen to take some of their composition in a form of benefits as oppose[d] to wages,” Lee said. “They are not overpaid on average. In fact, especially on top end where you have doctors and lawyers and accountants and professionals in the public sector, they are earning less even than the private sector can afford, even taking into the account the benefits.”
Liberals in Congress and throughout the country are on the defensive, as the recall effort of Governor Scott Walker (R-Wisc.) failed, despite strong backing from unions in Wisconsin and throughout the nation.
In order to gain some credibility, and attempt to pump up her union base, Lee has decided that new Democrat-driven, union-based talking points will suggest that lavish pensions are a right, not something to be earned.
No doubt the president and his campaign will be picking up on this for the 2012 campaign and exploiting it in the future.
