[hoyt-clagwell]

A women friend of the family makes $80K+ as a clerk in the local federal building. Mickey Mouse job, No college degree. Insane.....

[Tzimisce]

When they say “Redistribute the Wealth”, they meant your wealth.

Now pay your taxes, the hard working government needs a raise. :)

[jakerobins]

We need to impose term limits and cut the pay of Congress Critters..(including the stipulation that raises Congressional Pay each year)

[tx_eggman]

The total compensation that the U.S. government workforce is going to take in this year is approximately 447 billion dollars.

Is military pay included in this number?

Just askin'

[Digger]

Hopefully Americans will wake up and do something about this nonsense before it is too late.

LMAO. So what are ya gonna do little doggie? Are ya gonna bark all year or are ya gonna bite?

[RockinRight]

First order of business - kill the public sector unions.

Second order - get rid of the stupid pointless agencies like the TVA and sell off (there was a thread earlier today here on FR about this).

That’ll cut quite a nice chunk (but only a sliver of what is needed).

Pay rates are all over the map. The Heritage Foundation study has a few flaws, among them, not adjusting for the high cost of living in DC (granted, it’s partly due to the high salaries, it goes hand-in-hand) or the fact that $8/hr clerks at Wal Mart don’t have a federal equivalent. I’d rather keep the salaries and get rid of the ridiculous benefits they get.

As far as Congress...that’s a tough one. If we truly want “citizen legislators”, we can’t cut the pay so low that a person who is not independently wealthy couldn’t afford to be in Congress and still support their family and pay their bills. However, it shouldn’t be a meal ticket either.

What about a law stating that your pay as a US Representative or Senator will equal your most recent full-time job before being elected, adjusted for inflation and the cost of living in DC? That would mean that someone like Obama, whose last private sector job was for an ice cream stand, would make about $5/hr...lol...

[Daveinyork]

Federal employee to private sector worker:

“What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is ours, which means that sooner or later it will be mine.

[unique]

I lot of apples and oranges in this article, e.g. who cares what the net worth of those is Congress. With that said, increases do need investigation in some cases - hopefully someone is looking at that each year.

Also, I’d say that having to live is DC has got to be worth $25K to $50K more annually - so salaries aren’t that bad. The bad part is the benefit levels and the number of workers.

This type of article doesn’t do much to advance the position that something needs to be done - targeting is needed.

[Terabitten]

2 In 2005, 7420 federal workers were making $150,000 or more per year. In 2010, a whopping 82,034 federal workers are making $150,000 or more per year. That is more than a tenfold increase in just five years.

Just out of curiosity, are there any sources quoted for this? I'm a Federal employee, and I sure haven't seen any massive payraises since 2005. It makes me wonder if a)the author is making this statistic up out of whole cloth or b) there was a change in how compensation is counted, like health care is now counted towards salary, etc.

I find it VERY hard to believe this stat since *no* GS level job makes more than $129k (that's a GS-15 step 10) in base pay. It is possible to make more in overtime or locality pay (someone in Hawaii or LA makes more than someone in Nowhere, Iowa), but that's still a heck of a jump.

[jnsun]

The trade-off in the old days was government job security in lieu of pay lower than the private sector. This was a recognized individual career choice.

Having been a supervisor in both State and federal government for those who are not familiar, it is virtually impossible to layoff or fire an individual - indeed cuts must come generally en-masse from the elected officials, unrelated to personal productivity.

Today the government system of compensation has gotten completely out of hand. The disturbing thing is that at least forty percent of current government operations could be handled by competitive enterprise. Especially considering that today virtually every American citizen has ready access to product information that should be competitive. That is always what made America great - a kind of economic natural selection. And it is why the so-called "Progressives" are actually quite stupid and reactionary. They are of course are in it for their own power over others.

This includes teachers. The argument for higher public education teacher pay is totally irrational considering the reasonable question of, would you go back and pay WalMart more money if they foisted on you a defective flat-screen?

There is NO management in government circles, witness Barack Obama.

Of course we can, like Zimbabwe, just print more dollars.

Johnny Suntrade

[lp boonie]

If you want balance the budget you need to take on entitlements. Everything else is symbolic (not that symbolism isn’t important).

[tanknetter]

#2 In 2005, 7420 federal workers were making $150,000 or more per year. In 2010, a whopping 82,034 federal workers are making $150,000 or more per year. That is more than a tenfold increase in just five years.

#8 In 2005, the U.S. Department of Defense had just nine civilians earning $170,000 or more. When Barack Obama took office, the U.S. Department of Defense had 214 civilians earning $170,000 or more. In June 2010, the U.S. Department of Defense had 994 civilians earning $170,000 or more.

I think both of these have been debunked elsewhere as selective presentation of statistics. There are 2.7 million Federal employees, so the total number above $150k (82,034) represents the top 3% of the overall civilian workforce. Additionally, career civil servants' salaries are capped at the amount made by the head of the agency they work for, so when the head of the agency gets a raise, everyone in the paygrades (SES, GS15 etc) below him that are impacted by the cap automatically get one as well. So what we're seeing here is probably (because a full analysis has never been done, to my knowledge) a bunch of folks who were capped at just under $150k getting small increases (<2%, iirc) that took them to just over $150K.

In any event, we had a what? $1.8 TRILLION deficit last year? The Federal employee salary issue is peanuts, and the focus on it is symbolic and designed to draw focus/attention away from making cuts in areas that WILL make a difference.

[mewzilla]

BTTT.