10/29/09 Stockholm, Sweden – Because they’re getting it anyway. According to an analysis by Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, the average federal civilian earned about $120,000 in 2008 pay and benefits, as opposed to the $60,000 earned by a private sector worker.
It’s a huge and growing difference. It really began to widen in the year 2000, when it was “only” about a $30,000 gap between the two types of earners. Since that same year pay and benefits are up only 28 percent for private workers versus a staggering 58 percent for the federal crew. They’ve just been improving so much in handling government bureaucracy… in case you couldn’t tell.
The finding comes by way of The Daily Bail which also points out that for most government employees the “only chance to make that kind of money comes from having an employer that not only never has to make a profit but can forcibly take money through taxation.”
If the thought was that policy makers were merely transferring money from taxpayers to Wall Street… well, we can now rest assured they’re taking their own share as well. Visit The Daily Bail to view the complete story and to see a painful line chart that shows federal pay continue to skyrocket.
Rocky Vega
Rocky Vega is publisher of Agora Financial International, where he advances the growth of Agora Financial publishing enterprises outside of the US. Previously, he was publisher of The Daily Reckoning, and founding publisher of both UrbanTurf and RFID Update -- which he ran from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico -- as well as associate publisher of FierceFinance. Rocky has an honors MS from the Stockholm School of Economics and an honors BA from Harvard University, where he served on the board of directors for Let’s Go Publications, Harvard Student Agencies, and The Harvard Advocate.
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The issue isn’t why federal workers make so much, but why private sector workers make so little they had to take on so much debt etc. Globalization and “Free Trade” has devastated the income of US workers and that is the issue that should be addressed. Slap tariffs to equalize labor benefits and costs so offshoring of jobs is based on something else than wage arbitrage.