Government Workers are the New Rich

Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1824, “We have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.”
Today, the average federal worker makes $75,419 a year, while the average in the private sector is $39,751. State and local government employees averaged $48,362. What’s worse, as was recently reported in the New York Times there were no ‘net new’ private sector jobs created in the past ten years. Any net new jobs created have been create in the public sector. That’s right, you read it correctly, we haven’t expanded private sector employment in this country in 10 years!

The deeper you dig, the worse it gets. Include benefits in the comparison and the disparity gets larger and larger. By looking at the embedded chart, courtesy of the Cato Institute, you can see that the trend is worsening. I can only imagine what it will look like given the current loss of employment that is ongoing in the private sector.

The real question is what’s going on? The fire/layoff rate in the Federal Govt is 1/4 of the private sector, and the ‘quit rate’ is 1/3 that of the private sector so one can reasonably conclude that the Federal workforce has much longer average tenure and, given their growing unionization, COLAs and highly structured salary ladder which is in part based on seniority, one can quite easily see how we’ve arrived at such a disparity.

There are some good reasons for this too. The average Federal worker is also of higher quality in terms of education, experience and background but the jump in disparity from 66% to about 100% in the past 8 years just can’t be accounted for by that factor alone. No, what I believe we have done is create a system which increasingly serves itself versus the people  Any bureaucracy left unchecked will create a sinecure for itself. It’s time for a change. We need to downsize the Federal Government before we are all cutting the grass of the houses of federal employees.