In February, I wrote a post about the high wages of federal employees. As I wrote it, I was bothered by one thing: it's difficult to compare federal jobs to private jobs. I know with moral certainty that the government employees aren't working harder than the private sector employees, but I couldn't prove it, and I had an added problem: the jobs in the two sectors are often different (laid-off postmen, for instance, go postal for a reason: they get paid a lot for a skill that doesn't translate into the private sector, so they know they're screwed).
But now comes a MSM source that points out that, among careers that have roles in both sectors, the federal workers make more . . . a lot more:
Federal employees earn higher average salaries than private-sector workers in more than eight out of 10 occupations, a USA Today analysis of federal data finds.
Accountants, nurses, chemists, surveyors, cooks, clerks and janitors are among the wide range of jobs that get paid more on average in the federal government than in the private sector.
Overall, federal workers earned an average salary of $67,691 in 2008 for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. The average pay for the same mix of jobs in the private sector was $60,046 in 2008, the most recent data available.
These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Link (emphasis added).
Get a Pair
Another reason to dislike the Cleveland Cavaliers: Cleveland Cavaliers fans create world record for Most Snuggies Worn.
The Tory Twister
I saw this sentence over the weekend: "Birmingham [in England] was hit by a tornado five years ago and when homes were flooded these kind of items would have been very useful." I thought tornadoes only hit in the United States, like they were our own special disaster that no one else got to share. This is the first time I've heard of a tornado outside the U.S.
