Federal Workers Salaries Are Exploding During the Recession

According to a recent USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data, the number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession. Not gone up a bit, not grew at a reasonable and steady rate, but exploded. Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months — and that doesn't even include overtime pay and bonuses, which for some reason count as pay for executives but don't count as pay for civil servants.

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector. The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available. When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.

The USA TODAY analysis doesn't lay any blame to any particular party for this explosion in government jobs and pay, but the start of this boom time for government employees was 2007... right after Democrats took control of Congress, and since Obama's election to President, the hiring and raising of pay for government workers has risen sharply.

The USA TODAY analysis also doesn't advance that there is any sort of relationship between the recession and the boom in government jobs and pay, but I will voice that- the recession in our nation is partly attributable to the growth in government pay and jobs. Talented employees are being lured into inefficient and non-productive jobs in the government, and instead of producing products of value for society are instead regulating and taxing productive produces of value for society at ever increasingly rates. In Michigan, we watched the size of government grow and grow and grow, and the recession get worse and worse and worse, and no one ever put the two together- now we see it nationally- if you grow the size of government, you shrink the size of the productive workforce. And to pay for all these government workers, the government borrows money, which soaks up available funds for investment in the private marketplace, further dragging down the nation.

Today we read about how the Democrats in the government are attacking the pay of executives and businessman across the nation, as unelected and unconfirmed bureaucrats arbitrarily decide who gets 'paid to much' according to their nebulous unaccountable judgement calls. And yet Democrats are dramatically increasing the pay of government employees, raising caps on top administrators pays and pushing for more and more pay for government employees. This type of behavior- hypocritical, unethical, and illegal- marks tyrannies and corrupt institutions around the world, and is exactly what the Democrats are advocating.

Democrats believe you should make nothing but their politically connected friends should make more and more pay, and the numbers prove it- in the midst of a recession made worse by Democrat policies, the only people who have dramatically increasing pay and work are government workers.

Representative Jason Chaffetz, a Republican from Utah, said it best- "There's no way to justify this to the American people. It's ridiculous."