"By 2008, however, the total cost per civilian employee in the U.S. federal government had risen to $119,932, compared to $59,909 in the private sector. There can be no justification for paying federal employees twice the average private sector wage; the private sector, after all, has to pay the costs of employing all these overstuffed bureaucrats.
Even in state and local government, there is now a premium for wage costs over the private sector, though state-and-local government employees are, on average, less well- qualified than their private-sector counterparts.
There are some outrageous examples of feather bedding. Consider, for instance, the near-bankrupt state of California, which allows a worker to retire at 50 with an annual pension payout equal to 3% of salary for each year of service. In other words, a person who joined that state’s workers ranks at 20 can retire at 50 on 90% of salary - indexed to inflation with full healthcare benefits, of course
And last year - in the depths of a horrid recession, and with states forced to make draconian cutbacks to balance their budgets - the remuneration of state-and-local-government employees increased 2.4%, double the 1.2% increase seen in the private sector.
Cutting federal employees back just to their 1998 levels in terms of what the rest of us earn would involve a 15% pay cut. That’s a bit more than the 10% cut imposed by Chamberlain, but is certainly justified.
Based on 2008 figures, which must surely be conservative for 2010, given the recent growth in government, such a reduction would save $116 billion a year. That’s the equivalent of about $1.3 trillion between now and 2020, a 10-year stretch that represents the normal budgetary horizon.
That doesn’t eliminate the U.S. deficit problem, but it certainly makes a decent hole in it."
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article17479.html
Instead of bitching about cutting the pay of some poor schlep of a teacher, who gets the supreme joy of dealing with your teenagers all day, how about cutting these people?