As 500 Washington Federation of State Employees rallied at the Statehouse on Tuesday for pay raises, a claims manager for the Department of Labor and Industries explained his plight to a reporter for the Olympian.

Rent is up. Food is up. Fuel is up.

“Everything is going up, except our wages. We can’t even stay ahead of the cost of living,” Tim Rolfe said.

Meanwhile, Bridget Flory, another L&I worker, told The Spokesman-Review: “We realize that we’re in a bad economy, but it’s unfair to take it out on the backs of state employees.”

So where should we take it out? We could go to the vault to pay for wage hikes, but the state faces a projected $2.7 billion deficit. It’s also facing a school-finance funding overhaul and huge transportation and health costs.

Well, there’s always the taxpayers. How are they doing?

Washington Mutual, Weyerhaeuser and Starbucks each is laying off thousands of employees. Employment is down across the board. The same inflationary pressures dogging state workers are hitting everyone.

Plus, health care premiums are projected to rise by an average of 10 percent in 2009. Not that the rallying state workers will be much affected.

They’ve already secured a freeze in how much they contribute to their health care costs. So no break for taxpayers there.

Meanwhile, private sector employees can expect to shoulder a bigger load of their own health care costs. That is, if they have coverage in the first place. Only about 59 percent of employers offer health care plans, down from 70 percent in 1987.

State workers lament that pay isn’t keeping pace with inflation, but compare that with workers who have been laid off, had their pay cut or haven’t had a raise in years. In that context, recent state pay raises of 2 percent and 3.2 percent look pretty sweet.

Since 2004, funding for pay and benefits for teachers has risen 29 percent. For other state workers it’s up 31 percent. Some of that is due to new hires. Some is due to compensation increases.

We don’t mean to belittle the plight of state workers or devalue the work they do; nor do we mean to belabor the woes of this bad economy.

But that’s the well that public money must be drawn from, and it’s darn near dry.