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The federal government reported Friday that on average, its employees are underpaid by 26.3 percent compared with similar non-federal jobs

LOL! Federal employees conducted a "study" that illustrated that federal employees should be paid much better.

The methods BLS uses have been evolving, in part because funding is being cut off for a salary survey that it traditionally used in the federal pay comparison.

So they didn't have the funds to conduct a study, but the study they didn't conduct shows an increase in their suffering.

BLS presented an alternative set of figures based on a different set of data that showed the pay gap to be still larger.

They have another statistical mangling that can show even greater suffering on their part!

The conservative Heritage Foundation, for example, concluded last year that federal employees are overpaid by 22 percent on average.

For the other perspective.

[Retro Llama]

Unfortunately, the Heritage study turned out to be junk statistics -- they used lump-sum averages that did not account for (among other things) the obvious fact that the private workforce includes all sorts of low-paid grunt-labor jobs that have no government equivalent.

Heck, just the fact that the government can't hire illegal aliens probably accounts for a big chunk of the statistical anomaly in the Heritage numbers.