Coyote Blog

Also, do we have the data for 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009? That would be interesting. Did this happen stepwise, or was there a huge jump with the turnover in administration.

If it is the latter, then the taxpayers should be calling for impeachment.

And the progressive media presses Paul Ryan or John Boehner on how they'll actually be able to cut spending. Da, maybe they can cut government workers and and roll back wages for those that remain. A while back I heard an academic attempt to rationalize this growing disparity. He said something about the size and nature of national problems required top notch people to solve them. You have pay to get top talent. So the government not only pulls capital out of the markets, it also pulls talent. Although I'm not so sure we have the best and brightest walking the halls of government.

A Story about Federal Pay: The Veterans Health Administration has long had difficulties retaining fulltime physicians because the pay is so low compared to what physicians make in private practice or even academic medicine. The gap between VA and private pay is huge for some specialists. Many VA patients are admitted to private hospitals and are attended by private physicians at great costs to the VHA due to a lack of salaried specialists.

A few years ago, Congress passed a law to increase the salaries of VA physicians. The law required sorting physicians into tiers based on their specialties and typical incomes for private practitioners in those specialties. There were six tiers. One would expect that the highest paid specialists (neurosurgeons, transplant surgeons, cardiothoracic surgeons, radiation oncologists, etc.) would be in that top tier. One would be wrong. The top tier was for administrative VHA physicians in Washington, DC and in the 22 regional VHA offices. The bureaucrats and politicians take care of themselves above all others.

The program has failed for two reasons: the bureaucratic manipulation already mentioned and because Congress neglected to provide advance funding for better physician pay. (Advance funding was needed because it would take at least two years to hire physicians and get savings from decreased private hospital admissions.)

Mark - One of the major reasons is grade creep. For example a Border Patrol Agent in the late 90s had a journeyman grade of 9. In the early 2000s that increased to grade 11. As of October it changed to grade 12. That jumped the salary from $50,000, to $60,000, to $70,000 using the current figures.

Thanks paratrooper. To really understand the problem we need to know the mechanisms that are driving the numbers. Each mechanism has its own issues.

Using the example you have given for "Border Patrol Agent", is there justification for the grade creep? My instincts tell me that there isn't and that with the tens of thousands of Iraq war veterans that the supply of qualified people for these types of jobs would most likely excede the demand.

THe other obvious problem with skyrocketing government wages (including state and local) is the overtime issues. The workings of union contracts create tremendous opportunities to game the system to get multiples of salaries being paid as overtime. A private company would never pay the levels of overtime that the government does because if it had a real, long term demand for more labor it would simply hire more labor and dispense the overtime. But government seems to be captive of its employees who are allowed to do what benefits them to the determent of the public for whom they are to serve.

My guess is that the "grade creep" would also not be justified when looking at real labor market demands.