Public Apples, Private Oranges
Hardly a week goes by during which an editorial or column in a major newspaper doesn’t comment on how public sector workers are making a killing compared with their private sector counterparts. Recently, as a result of the "edujobs bill," there has been even more of this chatter than usual about “overpaid” government workers with “bloated benefits” and “fireproof” positions. Some of these commentaries even purport to present “evidence."
Earlier this week, for instance, a piece in the Washington Examiner cited data showing that average compensation (salary plus benefits) for federal government workers was roughly twice that of private sector workers. Sound remarkable? Not so much.
This “argument” is akin to comparing the compensation of employees at IBM versus WalMart. You are talking about two very different groups of jobs.