Cut Pay For Government Workers

I’m going to rail against this, but it’s only partly because I’m a Federal employee. It’s mostly because the authors are being deceitful.

If this were an airline or an automaker, the solution would be a no-brainer: It would be time for a big pay cut. If the company didn’t cut pay, or increased it, creditors and investors would question the seriousness of management.

The 2010 budget has a freeze of senior staff pay, and the 2011 budget that has been drafted proposes to extend
this pay freeze to all senior political appointees throughout the Federal Government and continue the policy of no bonuses for all political appointees. This is exactly the behavior that many taxpayers wanted, and often did not get, of high-level executive pay in the private sector in businesses that were being bailed out or supported by federal money.

But here’s the biggie:

[T]otal compensation per federal worker–cash earnings plus fringe benefits–now averages twice that of the private sector. So cutting cash earnings by 10% across the board seems not only reasonable, but justified.

The basic problem here is that this isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison — the spectrum of workers in the federal government is not even close to that of the private sector. Part of the reason for this is that there are many private-sector contractors that do work for the government, and a lot of these are low-paying, unskilled jobs, such as the janitorial staff. Many government jobs require a college degree, unlike a large number of private-sector jobs. I know that my local environment is not representative, but I’d be surprised if as many as 10% of the civilian government positions in the command don’t require a college degree, and perhaps a third of the staff have advanced degrees of some sort. This kind of comparison of averages of dissimilar distributions is at best incredibly misleading and at worst an out-and-out lie, like if you were comparing the compensation of the employees of a fast-food restaurant with the architectural and engineering firm on the next block, and concluding the A&E folks were overpaid.

What would be appropriate is a comparison of similar jobs within the government and private sector. Take me (please!) The median salary for a physicist working in industry was over $100k back in 2004 (couldn’t find anything newer), which was certainly more than I was making at the time, even with my locality pay for living in the DC area. I can think of many jobs where you would take a pay cut to work for the government — lawyers, I understand, can make a nice living in the private sector, much better than government lawyers or judges. And my Google-fu tells me that the article’s authors, Brian Wesbury and Robert Stein, both had stints in the federal government. They should have no trouble reporting how their private sector salary and compensation stacks up against what they received as federal employees, but that isn’t mentioned in the article.