Civil Servants

[TinCow]

That **** is crazy.

CR

That article gives absolutely no information on which positions are earning those salaries. How can you call those salaries crazy when you have no idea what the jobs are? Are you insinuating that there's no job in the entire federal government that warrants a $150-$170k salary?

Also, the Congress has been Democratic since 2006 - it was the Democratic congressmen who raised the salaries.

Federal employees get their salaries raised every year by between 1 to 3 percent, it's called a cost of living adjustment and is intended to compensate for inflation. It happens every year, regardless of who is in office in Congress. Republicans approve it annually just as much as Democrats do, and there's never any opposition to it by the minority party, regardless of who's in power. Considering that most federal employees are not eligible for bonuses, a 1 to 3 percent pay rise isn't very much.

FYI, federal salary information is not secret. The basic GS scale (which the vast majority of us are on) is freely available here. Pick an individual city to see the local cost of living adjustment, or use the 'Rest of United States' option if you want to see what the pay levels are outside of those cities. As you'll see, there are a lot of positions that aren't paying a whole lot, and it's only at the highest GS levels where anyone is making a 6 figure salary.

To give you a comparison, my agency hires attorneys at either the GS-9 level if they're fresh out of law school and at GS-11 if they've had at least 2 years of legal experience. On the DC pay scale, that's $50k for a new grad and $60k for an experienced attorney. Not only is that less than half of what big firms pay brand new attorneys, it's also in a city that's extremely expensive to live in. Keep in mind that the average person graduates law school with over $100k in debt due to student loans. The same is true for a lot of the other higher-pay scale jobs, which require Masters or PhDs. $100k isn't as much as it seems when you've got to pay $2k on loans every month on top of all your other living expenses, and those loans often can take 20+ years to pay off AND you can't get rid of them by bankruptcy.

Also, if you want to know much much money any single Federal employee makes, that information is also available to the public by law. You can get salary info through 2008 right here. Go look up the people you know in your area, I'm sure you'll find they're not stupendously wealthy.