A stirring short rant from a reader in the private-sector trenches, reproduced with permission.

Derb,
This seems like it would be down your alley. A friend of mine, Dan Proft, is running in the Republican primary for Governor here in Illinois — the only conservative in a solid field of RINOs. He’s plugged me into a lot of the public pension stuff that I never really paid any attention to before.
He notes (see here) that the average salary for a city employee of Joilet, Illinois is $83,500/yr. The average taxpayer cost per city employee once you calculate in the pension is $127,000/yr. And city employees make no contribution to their health care coverage and are not particularly interested in changing that. The average household income in Joliet is $47,700.
I recently started making around $250,000/yr, and President Obama says that now that I’ve made it I have to pony up. But the President is also telling the city workers of Joliet not to worry — they won’t have to pay one more penny in new taxes — it’s just guys like me who have to “pay their fair share.”
I met with a couple of investment guys this week. They told me that I need one million in the bank at the time I retire for every $20,000 I want to live off in interest each year. (They make the point that once I retire I will want all my money in low return, high quality havens.) So I’ll need more than $6 million to match the average Joliet employee. Oh, and when I die the Democrats want to keep me from giving that $6 million to my family.
Despite my current income (and my 1,300 sq ft condo), I don’t see having enough time left to come up with that $6 million so that I can live like a government bureaucrat. And yet between federal and state taxes, plus property and sales taxes, I have to pay about half of everything I make to the government in no small part so that the average public employee can live better in retirement than I’ll ever have a chance to dream about. And all the while I have to work 60-70 hour weeks, stressing about my competition, always at risk of losing the company, just so I can be sneered at by my President who tells me I’m not paying my fair share.

[Me]: I see no help for this poor guy. He’s a goner — sorry, pal. It’s not too late to save the children, though. Make sure you tell them, morning noon and night — GET A GOVERNMENT JOB!