For feds, more get 6-figure salaries: Average pay $30,000 over private sector

USA Today | 12/10/09 | Dennis Cauchon

[dcgst4]

You said it. I worked for a defense company (a big porker for a big dem) and the people spent all their time stabbing each other in the back. I hated it there. Tons of money rolled in though - it was the only real business in town.

I just got back from a week in Arlington, VA, across from Moscow on the Potomac. Ain’t now recession goin’ on down there! Sick, sick, sick...

[GOPJ]

Thanks for the ping.

[RinaseaofDs]

DC is a bubble. That simple. I was stunned to see the Retired Officers Association, off all the inconsequential associations in the world, in this palace located across the street from the Capitol.

DC and Crystal city look NOTHING like anywhere else in America, or even the world.

It would be instructive for everyone in the US to get a guided tour through it. I don’t think most would believe it.

The road from Dulles into DC is bizarre too. Every large corporation in the world it seemed had some office buidling with their logo in lights along that stretch of highway. There’s an elevated stretch of roadway with gleaming towers of glass in Crystal City that feels like something out of an 80’s science fiction flick. You should be wooshing along in your pod instead of driving between these huge glass buildings.

It’s not like Manhattan, where you have blocks of really beautiful, even opulent, buildings - always set off buy some quaint coffee shop, bodega, patisserie, or handbag shop at the sidewalk. Manhattan feels like there’s a mixture of empirical humanity at hand. DC doesn’t.

On the weekend, some of the most talented, most beautiful people you’ve ever seen are playing softball in the ball fields near the Lincoln Memorial on a Saturday in the summertime. You just stare at them and you say to yourself, “What in the f*ck are you doing wasting your life here?”

It is the biggest, softest, meanest place in the world in my opinion. There’s so much momentum built up behind vested interest in DC that you wonder whether a nuke taking the place out wouldn’t be all that bad an idea.

You seriously entertain that thought in one side of your head and condemn yourself for thinking it from the other side. As the condemnation sort of ebbs, you’re still left weighing the terrible merits of such a thing.

The very sickest thing I was left with was the realization that individually, I’m sure every single one of those people believed they were ‘making a difference’, and that DC was the place to make that difference.

[tanknetter]

So new hires were lower paying contractees generally and the govt employee work force kept getting older (and having more years of work in govt...thus more pay). Lack of new blood. Remember all the articles about the greying of the Fed work force? Young folks just could not get hired into the Fed civil service for many years with small exception.

That's the situation exactly. Automatic grade and step increases based on time in service ... not on performance.

Bad situation coming for when the Baby Boomers retire. Up-n-coming government managers (12-14s) still make less relative to their private sector managerial counterparts. Result will be an influx of either Liberal nanny-state do-gooders (who are willing to sacrifice salary in return for serving their cause) or incompetants (who can't get jobs elsewhere) into managerial positions.

[supremedoctrine]

Can’t get the initial link to the Westhampton cop story to display right. So other embedded link to Clarkstown story is lost too.
Best thing is to google Gothamist Westhampton cop

story will come up.

[hal ogen]

Its everywhere in the US. It is just more concentrated and intense here. What about your government worker pensions, benefits, expected work load and pay at all levels. How ‘bout those teachers...”working” eight or nine months a year? How ‘bout those professors with tenure taking a year off every seven with 1/2 pay? ...and then the retirement benefits. How ‘bout those government workers who are disabled, then double-dip in another jurisdiction? How ‘bout it????? Thirty and out with no age requirement for most govt employees. Health insurance paid forever. FEH!

[myknowledge]

More like centralization of wealth.

[myknowledge]

[logician2u]

Hey, if these top bureaurats don't command six-figure salaries they might find a cushy job in the private sector and then we'd have to hire someone less qualified and less experienced to fill his or her . . shoes. </sarc>

I've actually seen this offered as a reason we need to pay high-level government workers more than what they'd get doing an equivalent job in private industry (if there were, which in most cases there are not), so they won't leave.

Invaluable, irreplaceable, essential. All the attributes of the arrogance that accompanies government service.

[Stultis]

Conservatives need to keep pushing this issue. If it takes hold, it could be BIG. Not as directly tied to congress as the check-kiting and post office scandal the pressaged the turnover of Congress from Dim to Pubbie in '94, but on that same level as to igniting public disgust.

This is an ideal issue for conservative Republicans to run on. Often there is a tension between populist ideas and conservative principles, in particular economic populism versus free market promotion, but here there is a perfect synergy.

[Stultis]

DC is a bubble. That simple. I was stunned to see the Retired Officers Association, off all the inconsequential associations in the world, in this palace located across the street from the Capitol.

DC and Crystal city look NOTHING like anywhere else in America, or even the world.

Dubai on the Potomac?

[dragnet2]

Conservatives need to keep pushing this issue.

Don't worry....Will be doing this here and elsewhere, even with some of the pro big-gov individuals that hang out here.

[Lady Jag]

There's a crazy man in the WH.

[dragnet2]

“”There’s a crazy man in the WH.””

He replaced Bush...

Here’s Bush pimping home loans for totally unqualified minorities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW9viaJatpo

[dragnet2]

“””There’s a crazy man in the WH.”””

Whoop!

Here the correct link of Bush pimping home loans for totally unqualified minorities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3C0EwHZo0Q&feature=PlayList&p=778FA4AA82ECF885&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=3

[Lady Jag]

Do you know who/what he was reacting to? Hint, it’s from Chicago.

[dragnet2]

Feel free to be specific.

[dragnet2]

Are you suggesting Bush pimping here for home loans for totally unqualified minorities is not real or he was somehow told to say these things?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3C0EwHZo0Q&feature=PlayList&p=778FA4AA82ECF885&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=3

[Lady Jag]

No one is innocent. You've been around long enough that you should know that and then you'll be less exasperating.

Mortgage Crisis

And now we have the mortgage crisis, which has sent a shock wave through Wall Street and panicked world financial markets like no other since the stock market crash of 1929. But this is a problem created in Washington long ago.  It originated with the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), signed into law in 1977 by President Jimmy Carter. The CRA was Carter's answer to a grassroots activist movement started in Chicago, and forced banks to make loans to low income, high risk customers. PhD economist and former Texas Senator Phil Gramm has called it: "a vast extortion scheme against the nation's banks."

ACORN aggressively sought to expand loans to low income groups using the CRA as a whip. Economist Stan Leibowitz wrote in the New York Post:

In the 1980s, groups such as the activists at ACORN began pushing charges of "redlining"-claims that banks discriminated against minorities in mortgage lending. In 1989, sympathetic members of Congress got the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act amended to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants; this allowed various studies to be ginned up that seemed to validate the original accusation.

In fact, minority mortgage applications were rejected more frequently than other applications-but the overwhelming reason wasn't racial discrimination, but simply that minorities tend to have weaker finances.

ACORN showed its colors again in 1991, by taking over the House Banking Committee room for two days to protest efforts to scale back the CRA. Obama represented ACORN in the Buycks-Roberson v. Citibank Fed. Sav. Bank, 1994 suit against redlining.  Most significant of all, ACORN was the driving force behind a 1995 regulatory revision pushed through by the Clinton Administration that greatly expanded the CRA and laid the groundwork for the Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac borne financial crisis we now confront. Barack Obama was the attorney representing ACORN in this effort. With this new authority, ACORN used its subsidiary, ACORN Housing, to promote subprime loans more aggressively.

As a New York Post article describes it:

A 1995 strengthening of the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to find ways to provide mortgages to their poorer communities. It also let community activists intervene at yearly bank reviews, shaking the banks down for large pots of money.

Banks that got poor reviews were punished; some saw their merger plans frustrated; others faced direct legal challenges by the Justice Department.

Flexible lending programs expanded even though they had higher default rates than loans with traditional standards. On the Web, you can still find CRA loans available via ACORN with "100 percent financing . . . no credit scores . . . undocumented income . . . even if you don't report it on your tax returns." Credit counseling is required, of course.

Ironically, an enthusiastic Fannie Mae Foundation report singled out one paragon of nondiscriminatory lending, which worked with community activists and followed "the most flexible underwriting criteria permitted." That lender's $1 billion commitment to low-income loans in 1992 had grown to $80 billion by 1999 and $600 billion by early 2003.

The lender they were speaking of was Countrywide, which specialized in subprime lending and had a working relationship with ACORN.

Investor's Business Daily added:

The revisions also allowed for the first time the securitization of CRA-regulated loans containing subprime mortgages. The changes came as radical "housing rights" groups led by ACORN lobbied for such loans. ACORN at the time was represented by a young public-interest lawyer in Chicago by the name of Barack Obama. (Emphasis, mine.)

Since these loans were to be underwritten by the government sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the implicit government guarantee of those loans absolved lenders, mortgage bundlers and investors of any concern over the obvious risk. As Bloomberg reported: "It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit."

And if you think Washington policy makers cared about ACORN's negative influence, think again. Before this whole mess came down, a Democrat-sponsored bill on the table would have created an "Affordable Housing Trust Fund," granting ACORN access to approximately $500 million in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac revenues with little or no oversight.

Even now, unbelievably -- on the brink of national disaster -- Democrats have insisted ACORN benefit from bailout negotiations! Senator Lindsay Graham reported last night (9/25/08) in an interview with Greta Van Susteren of On the Record that Democrats want 20 percent of the bailout money to go to ACORN!

This entire fiasco represents perhaps the pinnacle of ACORN's efforts to advance the Cloward-Piven Strategy and is a stark demonstration of the power they wield in Washington.

Enter Barack Obama

In attempting to capture the significance of Barack Obama's Radical Left connections and his relation to the Cloward Piven strategy, I constructed following flow chart. It is by no means complete. There are simply too many radical individuals and organizations to include them all here. But these are perhaps the most significant.

The chart puts Barack Obama at the epicenter of an incestuous stew of American radical leftism. Not only are his connections significant, they practically define who he is. Taken together, they constitute a who's who of the American radical left, and guiding all is the Cloward-Piven strategy.

And so on.

Read the rest, http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/09/barack_obama_and_the_strategy.html

[Kozak]

This is why Federal, State and Local employees should NEVER have been allowed to unionize.