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Comment by pragmatic | Hacker News Reader

That was before federal workers earned twice as much as their private counterparts.

"Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data are the latest available."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/federal-workers-earning-doubl...

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I'm sympathetic to your point, but you can't really make this comparison, because it's apples-to-oranges. The set of jobs in each set is quite different. For example, there are few farmers in the government employ.

However, we can still reach interesting conclusions from the data. For example, I would expect that regardless of the salary of the job, benefits such as healthcare insurance would be fairly constant for employees anywhere, and that in the private sector, healthcare is probably the single largest chunk of benefits. With this observation, we'd have to conclude that whatever salary you're making, the government is throwing in a pretty significant amount of extra value into their employee's benefits, whatever that employee's job might be.

Even when broken down by industry group and job type (apples-to-apples), public-sector employees make significantly more than their private-sector counterparts, see this Department of Labor press release:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ecec.pdf

(On page 3 is a comparison of % spent on different benefits for public- vs. private-sector; not sure what conclusions can be drawn from it.)

Page 4: "Compensation cost levels in State and local government should not be directly compared with levels in private industry. Differences between these sectors stem from factors such as variation in work activities and occupational structures. Manufacturing and sales, for example, make up a large part of private industry work activities but are rare in State and local government. Professional and administrative support occupations (including teachers) account for two-thirds of the State and local government workforce, compared with one-half of private industry."

This varies very much depending on the state or department you work in. I work for the Government in Florida and the average IT pay was much lower than comparable jobs in the private sector. In IT I saw differences of about 20K in pay. I was looking at the salary scales and comparing them to the average for things like DBA/Sys Admin/Programmer.

Really it is the private sector employees that make much less than public employees. Except of course the CEOs and other way over paid executives.....

For example, there are few farmers in the government employ.

If only.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy

The low-paid immigrant farm workers effectively being paid by the government via subsidies count as "private-sector" employees for statistical purposes, though.

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