Posted on 02/15/2012 10:02:41 AM PST by blam
JEFF GUNDLACH: These 3 Charts On Government Jobs Should Make You Furious
Febuarary 15,2012
Sam Ro
Jeff Gundlach, the brains behind the $30 billion DoubleLine Capital, hosted a webcast with clients on Tuesday. The title of his presentation: "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire."
He drew parallels between the U.S. and Rome, highlighting excessive government spending.
Gundlach noted that one of the major problems with U.S. federal deficits is federal government employee pay.
He was appalled to see that these employees made "so much more than the private workers, who pay the taxes, that pay the salaries of the government workers!"
We pulled the three slides from Gundlach's presentation where he discusses this issue.
Click Here To See The 3 Slides From Gundlach's Presentation
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
That must mean the MIC??? Right?
Surely not the branches of military.....
I wondered about that too. I know every year that I was in, I got a statement that included all of the benefits I was getting and informed me that I was actually making much more that I realized. It was hog wash...it is probably the source for these numbers.
This is yet another example of demonizing federal employees by comparing apples to rocks. The vast majority of federal employees are educated. Comparing this to the private sector makes no sense - it’s basically no different than saying that your local bank pays its employees more than your local McDonald’s and concluding that the bank employees are overpaid. They don’t do the same job. The government pays basically nobody to do janitorial work, groundskeeping, hospitality, or anything like that.
I looked at moving last year and I can assure you that the private sector offers me more in “total compensation” than the government does but I decided not to move. Comparing apples to apples, you will find that government employees earn LESS than their private-sector counterparts. This is the reason that locality pay exists in the first place. The idiots in Congress (from both parties) naturally fail to recognize this. The federal pay freeze (as of right now, anyway) is set to expire. Locality pay should increase substantially to account for the huge jump in the public/private pay gap (in the end, saving nothing).
It just pisses me off when I read these things weekly saying somebody in Congress wants to either freeze or cut the pay for federal employees or cut the benefits of federal employees. The dollars saved are trivial - if I remember correctly, freezing federal pay saved something like $10 billion a year. These people are by definition middle-class (those on the general schedule are capped) and they are penalized while the government spends an order of magnitude more to pay people not to work.
Way low.....IF you are considering Hollyweird, ABC , NBC, , CBS, NFL, NBA, MLB....
Are you saying...most American's not in the Federal work force...aren't?
The government pays basically nobody to do janitorial work, groundskeeping, hospitality, or anything like that.
Really? I dunno....about that. Are those job's farmed out? Even if they are..."we" are still paying for it. Right?
FWIW-$10 billion isn't trivial to me........
Paper pushers do not need to be educated, but they do get paid more if they are. Government is doing many things that they should not be doing, most likely 50% of the government work force could be fired and it would be better for the country.
All the hundreds of people who work on movies don’t make the scratch the big stars do. Local radio/tv are not high paying jobs either. The big paychecks for the big stars are probably significantly skewing the average.
With regards to your “locality pay”. Are you saying that an FBI agent HAS to get his LEAP(10hrs overtime everyweek - the payweek is based on a 50hr workweek) and LOCALITY pay(varies across the country). But the local detective, who does more work in a month than most agents do in a year OR MORE, can live in the same place, without those incentives?
If so, then you’ll cry that feds aren’t eligible for overtime like the locals. Wrong. In most cases, the feds aren’t. But what do they get in return: FREE VEHICLE - just in case they have to race into work in the middle of the night. FREE GAS for FREE VEHICLE. GOVERNMENT CREDIT CARD-you know, just in case they have to follow Fugitive #1 half way across the country and have to buy underwear and toothpaste. However, the wrench in all of the above IS, that while some feds aren’t eligible for OT, quite a few are. Secret Service, DSS, Air Marshals.
Can’t get much more furiouser (yes, I made that up) than I already am...
I'd like to know exactly who they are and aren't counting.
Good point.
I made the move last August. I took a $6K cut and a slightly less generous benefits package.
I got lots more work and job security out of the deal.
To clarify, I made the move from industry to the government.
My consulting company did many salary surveys for government entities, and even in the 90’s Government employees doing the same job, and eductaion level(though gov has lower entrance standards) on a total compensation basis(includes wages & benefits) were making 20% more than in the private sector. It started to even out a bit as you moved yo the management ranks. Of course any manager that was good would leave for the private sector. Typically management in the public sector is not too good - of course we all know that.
Not at all. I’m saying that the percentage of federal employees (not state or local, as there is a huge difference) with a degree is much higher than the percentage of private employees with a degree. This is because the federal government does not have many blue-collar workers as I mentioned. They contract it out. While it comes out of the same budget, the salary is not considered in such a comparison. Where I work, we contract with an organization that provides developmentally disabled individuals to do janitorial work. We contract with another general facilities company to handle maintenance and repairs. It is my guess that they make substantially less than the average government employee, but the overall point (lost in nearly all of these pieces) is that they aren’t doing the same job.
$10 billion isn’t trivial. I don’t disagree. I simply feel like we’re living in some kind of sci-fi dystopia where we provide “unemployment compensation” for two years instead of a competitive salary for trained engineers. We pay for federal inspectors to seize the lunches of preschoolers. We pay for the medical insurance of families well above the poverty line. The lack of priority is astounding.
I’m an engineer. I can guarantee that I can get paid more in the private sector. You might ask why I remain a federal employee and the answer is that I have had my graduate school tuition paid. Once I finish, I will be looking elsewhere.
I am certain that some people in the federal government are overpaid. I am also certain that lumping engineers in with tenured clerical employees makes no sense. I am even more certain that comparing the “average federal salary” with the “average private salary” makes similarly less sense. It would make the most sense if we could say that in a given area, if a private sector employee’s total compensation is X, then a public sector employee’s total compensation should also be X if the employees are about equal. What this does is punish the already underpaid federal workers (such as scientific and technical personnel) because the overpaid federal workers (clerical and administrative, for example) make too much and the government either can’t be troubled or isn’t smart enough to separate the two. It would make the most sense to freeze some salaries and raise others.
Job security is the primary reason that people make that move. It used to be that you took the lower salary the government offered because the benefits were superior. Now, at least in the defense sector, both the benefits and the salary are superior in private industry. The last remaining reason to remain a federal employee is the pension - a package which has already been significantly reduced compared to the way it was (FERS compared to CSRS) and is now the new favorite target.
This isn’t about saving money directly. It’s about cutting the workforce through attrition and it remains to be seen how it will work. The average defense employee will still be paid by the taxpayer whether they work for a government agency or private industry.
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