This may not be as dumbfounding as being told not to advertise for reliable people in England, but I certainly was shocked to see that nearly one-in-five federal bureaucrats is paid more than $100,000 – and that doesn’t even include overtime and bonuses! Or how about the fact that number of bureaucrats making more than $170,000 at the Department of Transportation jumped from one to 1,690. No wonder the average bureaucrat makes 76 percent more than someone in the productive sector of the economy. If you want to get angry, read Jeff Jacoby’s column:
Since December 2007, when the current downturn began, the ranks of federal employees earning $100,000 and up has skyrocketed. According to a recent analysis by USA Today, federal workers making six-figure salaries – not including overtime and bonuses – “jumped from 14 percent to 19 percent of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months.’’ The surge has been especially pronounced among the highest-paid employees. At the Defense Department, for example, the number of civilian workers making $150,000 or more quintupled from 1,868 to 10,100. At the recession’s start, the Transportation Department was paying only one person a salary of $170,000. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees were drawing paychecks that size. All the while, the federal government has been adding jobs at a 10,000-a-month clip. Between December 2007 and June 2009, federal payrolls exploded by nearly 10 percent. “Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time in pay and hiring,’’ USA Today observes, “during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.’’ And to add public-sector insult to private-sector injury, data from the Office of Personnel Management show the average federal salary is now roughly $71,000 – about 76 percent higher than the average private salary.
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