Clearly, Bill Gates is not paying his fair share to private sector innovators. Quick, somebody pass a law!
It’s regularly been pointed out that the average compensation—that includes pay and benefits—for federal workers is now double the private sector average. Defenders of federal employees have routinely insisted that this is an unfair comparison. Well, Andrew Biggs, the former Social Security Administration deputy commissioner for policy and American Enterprise Insititute Scholar, points to this astonishing fact:
The average federal government employee receives a salary of around $75,000 per year. With present and future fringe benefits equal to about 76 percent of salaries, that makes for total annual compensation of around $133,000. How does this match up to the private sector?
CNN Money has a nice survey of the 25 highest paying companies in the country, outlining the average total compensation per employee in each one. According to CNN, the closest match to federal employment is Microsoft, whose average employee compensation is 133,023 per year, making it the 17th highest paying company in the country.
On the flip side of the argument, though, I think we can all agree that determining worth based on whether you’ve advanced solutions to virtual projection across digitized space, vs determining worth based on how effective you’ve been at diverting people away from your particular station at the MVA, is both unfair and discriminatory — and would only increase “income disparity”. Which is why it is the job of the government to step in and elevate government sector compensation with private sector tax dollars while simultaneously punishing the private sector for its insidious attempts to reward merit not defined on a relative scale: a good technological innovator shouldn’t be paid significantly more than a good MVA employee, should s/he?
Rather than worry about federal employees compensation, perhaps conservatives should ask themselves why they so hate fairness.
It’s amazing how much money is being spent on people who don’t produce anything. Way back when you traded the security of a government job in exchange for getting paid less than in the private sector. Now, there is no penalty at all in working for the government.
Now, there is no penalty at all in working for the government.
That’s changing, thanks in large part to the fine people of SquidCo(tm) and CrankyCudgels, Inc.
Objectively racist. Denounced. Denounced and condemned.
*sigh*
Today looks like a good day for LOLcats.
Yes, but does Microsoft recognize gay marriage?
(Sorry; couldn’t help myself!)
If Microsoft recognizes gay marriage, it’s only because they’ve rejected the norms of HTML and come up with their own bastardized tags that clutter the hell out of web pages without adding a dram of functionality.
<mso-pairing-hetero: normal; mso-pairing-homo: normal>your marriage here</mso-pairing-hetero: normal; mso-pairing-homo: normal>No, really. It’s a very good day to obsess about lexicography rather than politics.
Well, now we know how CODE tags render.
Poorly.
Oh, don’t get me started…
On the other hands, it distracts me from the anger of the occutards, so…
I have a PERFECT use case for Scalable Vector Graphics. I’ve built the screen with SVG, I’ve tested it. It will do EVERYTHING we need, gives the users infinitely scalable zoom. It displays beautifully on Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera…
And MSFT won’t support SVG until maybe the next release of the loose-flying formation of bugs they call a browser.
Guess which is the company standard?
See, I’ve already learned a new, quite useful word: coprolalia, “the Lefty equivalent of a cogent argument.”
As for using IE as the company standard, that gets ME started on the bundling argument and our long-lost Netscape, which was sunk by Gates’ foul insistence on Ruling The World With His Software.
Figures. The freak is a full-on Lefty with aspirations to the One Ring Of Power. And corporate suits, not understanding that the Microsoft logo does not mean compatibility with other Microsoft products (much less quality), figure they’ll just stick with the default, to the protestations of the techies.
Oh, the days when the techies chose the technology. When NetWare ruled the LAN and Windows NT was the exception rather than the rule.
Fair is something that comes around once a year and you get corndogs on a stick. And a midway. And some really cheap made in China prizes.
The Marshall Tucker Band chain wallet I got for pitching dimes into beer mugs was not made in China, JimK. I simply do not accept that.
I wonder if they counted the military as federal employees. If they did the non-military average would be much higher. There are a lot of low ranking, low pay servicemen and women.
This information needs to be coupled with the ongoing expansion of the civilian federal workforce.
More drones, at higher pay too! Complete with “fairness”, cronyism, and righting past injustices being the major factors involved in hiring decisions instead of, you know, talent, ability, and experience…
I wonder if they counted the military as federal employees.
Doubt it. The military performs an actual service, for which we’re all happy to pitch in with taxes.
Federal bureaucrats just sit around and generate red tape, so naturally they’re better paid.