patrick.net

CL says

I thought it was relatively widely accepted that Government pay was usually lower than the private sector but that the trade-off was stability. They also tend to receive good benefits, perhaps better than their private sector counterparts.

Government pay has been better for quite some time, meaning more than 10 years by now. Get with the times.

IDDQD says

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-04-federal-pay_N.htm

These salary figures do not include the value of health, pension and other benefits, which averaged $40,785 per federal employee in 2008 vs. $9,882 per private worker, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

CalPers alone destroys any private sector retirement plan based on compensation. Of course, CalPers needs to gut local municipal treasuries to the bone, and bankrupt entire regions to survive, but if you're on the profit end of that type of criminal venture, there's very little to complain about.

For every article that says it's better to be on the Government payroll, I see another that says it's not:

http://www.federalnewsradio.com/520/3085581/Pay-gap-between-government-private-sector-widens-to-34-percent

It's not fair to compare a "doctor" to a researcher at NIH, etc. So, I reckon figures lie and liars figure.

Hence my call for hard data. Is there any metric to gauge these in an unbiased way, like so many do with FRED data?

New Rules!

We can't get out of our economic funk, by pointing fingers at other people and looking in their wallet. I mean what someone else makes is not a bad thing. If you are having problems making ends meet, then "What you make" is your problem.
I would like someone to explain to me, how harassing everyone over what they make, and creating witch hunts to get this group of people's pay cut, benefits anyone, who doesn't make enough money to make ends meet.
If anything, those fools are only sealing their fate, and condemning them selves to a life of destitution, with no chance of ever getting ahead.

What will happen, these whining entitled little shits, are going to grow up one day, and try to put on the big pants, and get ahead and just do what was always natural for a maturing American, who finally got their shit together as they get older. When these people realize the problem isn't what everyone else makes, it's what they make. Or more importantly, how little they put into something, and are disappointing with the return. There wont be any rungs on the ladder to get ahead.

We should raise the voting age to 30, young and dumb voters are a dangerous thing, coupled with social media.