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.
Can’t get much more furiouser (yes, I made that up) than I already am...