Jonathan Chait Cohn tells us that public-sector employees are the new welfare queens. Quite: any time you try to talk about the fiscal plight of state and local government, you get spittle-flecked denunciations of unions and their crazy pay packages.

So, how much truth is there to this? State and local employees are paid more, on average, than private-sector workers — about 13 percent more, according to this analysis by John Schmitt. But as Schmitt shows, that’s an apples and oranges comparison: state and local workers are much better educated and somewhat older than private-sector workers, and once you correct for that the comparison actually seems to go the other way.

I think the easy way to think about this is to realize that about half of state and local workers are teachers and academic administrators — which means that they’re college-educated, at minimum. And think about it: how many ambitious young people do you know saying, “My goal in life is to become a high school teacher — that would put me on easy street”?

Yes, firefighters and police get pretty generous pay packages; they also pull people from burning buildings.

And here’s a point I haven’t seen made: even if you believe that the age-and-education-adjusted calculations are wrong, and public employees do get paid somewhat more than they “should”, how big a deal is that? I went to the Census state and local finance data, and got this picture of the composition of non-federal government spending:

U.S. Census Bureau

A few percent either way in workers’ compensation would not make a big difference to state and local spending. This is a phony issue.

Of course, so were the welfare queens.

Update: A number of commenters have alluded to large unfunded pension liabilities. Two points: first, the fact that state and local governments haven’t been making large enough contributions to pension funds says nothing, one way or the other, about whether workers are overcompensated. Bear in mind that, as Cohn notes, many government employees don’t get Social Security. Second, a “trillion dollar liability” needs to be placed in context: state and local governments spend $2.8 trillion per year. Compare the pension liability with total spending over, say, the expected remaining lifetimes of those workers, and it’s a real problem but not inconsistent with my point that these compensation issues have been grossly overstated.