To: Bonefish who wrote (701492 ) 2/28/2013 11:26:10 AM From: SilentZ Respond to of 1577194 >Americans believe public workers better paid and more secure (Bingo!) The key phrase there is "Americans believe." Americans believe a lot of things that are wrong, and that's often because of deliberate disinformation campaigns on the part of the Republican Party. >(How many public employees does it take to watch a backhoe dig a hole?) OMG! One picture without any context of three people standing. Wow, that means something. >In the 1,420 days since he took the oath of office, the federal government has daily hired on average 101 new employees. Every day. Seven days a week. All 202 weeks. That makes 143,000 more federal workers than when Obama talked forever on that cold day in January of 2009. Yes. There have been new workers. There always will be. But workers also leave and retire and aren't replaced, and 143,000 figure likely also likely includes people that were hired temporarily to conduct the census. There were 2.25 million federal workers in Jan 2009, and there are slightly under 2.2 million now. In the meantime, private sector employment has been growing for 3+ years now. >Under Obama the total federal workforce has surpassed two million for the first time since the first Clinton term, now sitting about the 2.2 ,million level. Not according to the BLS. It's been over 2 million since the 90s. >Now comes a new poll revealing that Americans know what's going on. A majority of Americans believes government workers make more money than private sector workers, according to the new Rasmussen Reports poll . Sixty-one percent of private sector workers believe that. It's been shown many times that once you account for education level, job duties and tenure, that this isn't the case.voices.washingtonpost.com There are a small number of people in the federal government making over $300,000. When we talk about the private sector, you guys plead poverty for people making that much. And most of the people making that much in the public sector are doctors or lawyers. Or President (who, in this case, is a lawyer too). >Obama has frozen the inflated federal salaries into next spring, while the Republican platform in this fall's campaign called for a 10% reduction in the federal labor force through attrition. The reelected Obama seems unlikely to go along with that idea. That would be absurd. The population is growing and growing. We need more public sector workers to serve them, or else we won't be able to keep up with things like food inspections, labor inspections, tax collection... oh, but that's what conservatives want, anyway. >"The federal workforce has become an elite island of secure and high-paid workers, separated from the ocean of average American workers competing in the global economy," according to a report this year by the Cato Institute. Translation: We've succeeded in making the private sector workforce lower paid and less secure, but haven't succeeded as well in the public sector. >The latest IRS report said, for instance, that 36 of Obama's White House aides had $833,000 in unpaid back taxes. How does this compare to aides in other administrations, or the private sector? It means nothing without context. -Z