Around the holidays an important story broke in USA Today. This publication is not known for its conservative slant and usually leans heavily to the left. This story pertains to the salaries of government employees.
For years workers who were adverse to competition in the private sector chose to take a less stressful job with the federal government. That practically always required a decrease in compensation but was offset by tremendous health care benefits, more vacation and holiday days, a great pension and unless you killed three or more people, no worry about a pink slip.
Today all these aforementioned goodies still exist for government employees and now compensation for federal employees far exceed pay in the private sector. As noted by USA Today federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time – in pay and in hiring – during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.
How bad is it? The average pay for government workers is $30,000 above those in non-government jobs. Not only that but the increases the past few years are much higher for government’s Joes and Janes.
Most agree the recession started in January 2008. During that time non-governments workers saw many of their neighbors lose their jobs and very few had notable pay increases. In company after company employees took a cut in pay by working fewer hours in order to minimize the necessity to cut more jobs when revenues for the companies decreased.
In the meantime pay and benefits for federal employees have exploded for the last 18 months. The trend to six figure salaries is occurring throughout the federal government. When the recession started the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later 1,690 employees had compensation above that amount. Following a similar pattern the Defense Department had 1,868 workers with take home pay in excess of $150,000. In June of 2009 those that had compensation over $150,000 rose to 10,100 employees. If you updated that today, the amounts would be even more embarrassing.
All of these figures may be confusing. This chart is perhaps more effective in explaining what has happened in the eighteen month period Jan. 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009:
Growth in number of employees
making more than $150,000
Agriculture 147%
Commerce 395%
Defense 441%
Education 296%
Justice 567%
State Dept. 323%
HUD 227%
And on and on and on………..
So every time you pay your income tax or look at your pay-stub and notice your income tax withholding, you should be comforted to know you are allowing more and more of your fellow government workers to enjoy a bonanza unknown in modern times.
Some of my liberal friends will immediately respond, what about these high paid corporate chiefs who are paid tens of millions of dollars? Let me answer this logically. First I cannot defend the pay of some of the corporate elite but remember this: Only a few in even the largest corporations receive outlandish amounts and the average duration of their tenure as corporate chiefs is about 3 ½ years. How long has it been that any government department head has been thrown out on his ear or derriere due to poor performance?
Another point to remember is these corporate chieftains head up organizations that provide goods or services while governments produce nothing.
They only shuffle paperwork to transfer funds from one party to another party. The one exception – our military.
The federal government for 2009 added jobs at the rate of 10,000 per month.
This is the fastest pace in the last 50 years when Medicare and Medicaid started.
What happens when industrial companies lose money or experience a significant drop in revenue and profits? Answer – expenses are reduced including compensation to employees. Contrast this to the federal government whose revenue is running an 18 percent decrease in this fiscal year and projecting a 1.8 trillion deficit. Is it any wonder U.S. taxpayers have an almost zero percentage confidence on the ability of the federal government to be fiscally responsible?
Keep in mind all these gloomy and depressing facts on the number of federal employees are before any implementation of the new health care bill.
No one seems to care that tens of thousands of federal jobs will be required for the staff of 120 new commissions, the new enforcers and auditors for the 2,100 pages of regulations, not to mention the thousands that will be added to the IRS rolls to collect and enforce penalties, interest and taxes.
Perhaps the answer is to get rid of all these nasty for-profit companies that make things and deliver services. Who wants to work for a company that concentrates on greed? Rather, let’s all work for the federal government.
We can all have guaranteed compensation increases, great benefits and paid time-off and never worry about losing your job. Come to think of it, we are well on the way to this impossible situation.
(Jerry Jackson of Heber Springs writes his “conservative viewpoint” column each Wednesday)
Heber Springs, Ark. —
