Public workers hold last middle-class spot

Regarding "Tax public workers' pensions as income" [Letters, Jan. 6], for decades, people who worked for towns, cities, states and the federal government gave up the high-flying salaries of the private sector. They traded these paychecks for a decent pension and a modicum of job security.

If the private sector had honored the contracts they had made with their workers, not shipped decent manufacturing jobs overseas for dirt-cheap labor and starved their workers in favor of the soft-palmed stockholders, those salaries and pensions wouldn't have collapsed.

Rather than attack the only surviving sector of the middle class, why not penalize the robber barons of Wall Street? There seems to have been no suffering in that sector in this difficult economic climate.

Ann Kemler

Long Beach