NJ Governor Chris Christie giving a schoolteacher what-for YouTube There's no question that stories about the pay of public sector workers (especially the unionized ones) resonate intensely with folks.

During a time when everyone's talking about austerity, and state and city governments face widespread solvency concerns, it's a great time to take pot shots at those who work for the government.

And as POLITICO notes, everyone's taking part in the sport:

Republicans around the nation have cheered New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose shouting match over budget cuts with an outraged teacher—“You don’t have to” teach, he told her without sympathy—became a YouTube sensation on the right last week.

And even Democrats, like the nominee for governor in New York, Andrew Cuomo, have echoed the attacks on unions.

Christie is merely the most florid voice for a calculated, national effort to fundamentally reshape the debate on the labor costs that account for the bulk of government spending at every level. And at the core of the shift is a perception among many political leaders that public anger at civil servants is boiling over.

“We have a new privileged class in America,” said Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who rescinded state workers' collective bargaining power on his first day in office in 2006. “We used to think of government workers as underpaid public servants. Now they are better paid than the people who pay their salaries.”

The big problem is the perceived lack of equality in sharing the pain. Private sector workers have seen layoffs and big paycuts. That's happened a bit in the public sector, but it's been far less visible, and the fact that the public sector is more unionized has helped the ones on the inside greatly fight reform.

If things don't snapback soon, it feels as though the dam is about to break on this, and that in states like New Jersey, Illinois, California, New York, and others, the backlash against public sector workers -- whether fair or not -- is about to bite.

Now: Click here to meet the 8074 MTA workers making more than $100,000 per year >