Federal Workers Don’t Share Recession Pain

While many workers in the private sector have been suffering the effects of the recession, federal employees have been enjoying a boom in employment and compensation — at taxpayers’ expense.

“For nearly two years, millions of private-sector workers have made often painful sacrifices because of failed federal economic policies and skyrocketing federal spending and debt. But the opposite has been true for federal workers,” the Washington Examiner states in an editorial.

According to the Examiner:

Beginning in 2008, federal employees earning $100,000 or more a year rose from 14 percent to 19 percent of the civil service workforce of 2 million.
During that period, Washington added around 100,000 new jobs, while more than 7 million private-sector jobs were lost.
The average compensation for a federal worker now stands at $123,049, more than double the private-sector average.
Of the 10 counties with the highest per capita income, six are in the Washington, D.C., area.

The Heritage Foundation reported that four out of the five jobs President Obama claimed were “created or saved” by the stimulus bill were in government.

Now Rep. Mike Coffman, a Colorado Republican, wants bureaucrats and politicians to share the pain. He has a proposal to furlough all nonessential federal workers for two weeks next year, and to cut the salaries of senators and representatives by 10 percent.

But the House Democratic leadership recently refused to schedule a vote on a bill introduced by Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, D-Ariz., to cut congressional pay by 5 percent. Coffman’s proposal is not likely to fare much better — it’s been 77 years since Congress voluntarily took a pay cut.

But the Examiner warns: “In the year of the Tea Party, if the rest of Congress doesn’t take the Coffman and Kirkpatrick bills seriously, voters will have the opportunity in November to remind them what it’s like to be unemployed.”