The More on Federal Salaries

The earlier post on federal salary increases did not include two elements. First, there has been a huge jump in federal employees making more than $170,000 salaries. For example, there was but one U.S. Department of Transportation when the current recession began. Today, 18 months later, there are more than 1,600 career employees making that much at Transportation. That is a pretty big jump by any measure. At the same time in the original story one justification made for the differential in salaries was the higher percentage of federal employees who are professionals/scientists/engineers.

What amused me about the second comment was the notion about where employees are clustered. The differential between $41,000 in the private sector and $71,000 in the public sector would require that the feds employ almost twice the number of high income employees to get that differential. To suggest that government employs technical and highly educated people at a rate twice that of the private sector is simply nonsense.

The four maps in this post are from a site called JobBait which does some mapping on employment. It shows some interesting data. The four maps show, from left to right, changes in employment in healthcare, education,manufacturing and government. Notice a couple of things about the maps. Growth in the last 12 months has been primarily in sectors which use as a primary resource - government funding. Green means growth, red decline and black decline by more than 8%. Second, although the government numbers are red for California, when you look at particular numbers for state government that is one of the sectors of growth for the California economy. That long term trend for the state suggests problems ahead. (Big problems.)