Federal Government Now Paying Lots of People $150,000 For Some Reason
While the U.S. economy continues to suck, unemployment holds at a very high level, and employers are cutting salaries and benefits at every turn, one important employer is actually paying 11 times more people $150,000-a-year salaries than it did five years ago. And that employer is the federal government. Good for them! Hey, if your company is making record profits like the federal government is, you really should reward your employees. Still, federal employees are said to earn less than private-sector workers in similar jobs. But that's not stopping Republican Congressman Jason Chaffetz from deciding that all federal employees need an across-the-board pay cut right now.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, who will head the panel overseeing federal pay, says he wants a pay freeze and prefers a 10% pay cut. "It's stunning when you see what's happened to federal compensation," he says. "Every metric shows we're heading in the wrong direction."
The wrong direction to what? What is the right direction, an entire bureaucracy of unpaid interns? That may work just as well as what we currently have, actually.
President Obama, on the other hand, is seeking a 1.4% across-the-board pay raise to federal workers this year for some reason.
Since 2000, federal pay and benefits have increased 3% annually above inflation compared with 0.8% for private workers, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Good for them, we guess? Chaffetz needs to shut up with this pay cut talk. Pretty soon, with this whole private-enterprise unemployment thing, Chinese-funded-debt-backed federal jobs will be the only jobs in this country, except for a few multinational corporate CEO jobs. And we will need those government jobs to provide all the salary we can get. [ USA Today ]
When the right wing nutz want to push to preserve the Bush Tax Cuts, someone earning $250,000 a year isn't the least bit wealthy.
However, if the Federal government is paying an employee $150,000 a year that's a fortune and that person is wildly overpaid.
OK - which is it?
Government work: the only sector of the market-based economy where paying people more to attract better employees is viewed as a negative.