In light of budgetary issues across the state, public safety and service employees have been taking a beating in the press for their salaries and retirement benefits. What has consistently been absent is the fact that the cities, counties, and state, who all had their own financial analysts, all agreed to provide those benefits to their employees. The same holds true for salaries. Why now is the burden of these budgetary hard times all the employee’s fault? Another tidbit the public probably does not know, using myself as an example, is that I pay twice the percentage into PERS for my retirement than non-public employees pay into Social Security. If investment equals return, why are the public employees now the bad guys and their employers the victims?