Paul Waldman says that as conservative deficit hawks go looking for new targets, expect to hear a lot about outsized federal paychecks.
In late 2008, as the government began debating whether to save General Motors and Chrysler from bankruptcy, conservatives saw an opportunity to open a new front in their decades-long war on labor unions. So a new talking point emerged, repeated first by representatives of conservative think tanks, then by conservative talk-show hosts and columnists, then by Republican members of Congress. The Big Three auto companies had been crippled, they said, by greedy United Auto Workers members whose absurd union contracts had them making an astonishing $70 per hour on average.
You won’t be surprised to learn that the figure was utterly bogus — the average pay of an auto factory worker at the time was actually around $28 an hour, or a decidedly middle-class salary of $58,000 a year. But even as a little-remembered component of a short-lived debate, it is a good case study in why the right is so effective. An idea like the mythical $70-an-hour autoworker can be created out of whole cloth, then quickly move through the conservative media and be adopted by opinion leaders at all levels. The left has neither an equivalent media structure nor the same willingness to grab talking points and stick to them so assiduously.
