A great explanation of the conservative argument that federal workers are “overpaid”

Matthew Yglesias provides a great explanation of how conservatives try to argue that federal workers are overpaid:

…this AEI working paper (PDF) [that’s] dedicated to the proposition that federal employees are “overpaid” seems to me to actually offer evidence that the federal pay scale is too stingy.

The authors describe the federal government’s official methodology:

The process is complex, but the Pay Agent essentially seeks to assign a general schedule (GS) level to a variety of private sector jobs within a broad set of occupational categories. Salaries for these jobs are then compared to salaries for federal positions at the same GS level. Private sector jobs assigned to a given GS level are typically seen to be more highly paid than their federal counterparts.

They characterize the Pay Agent’s method as concluding that federal workers are “underpaid.” But they criticize this method:

[T]he Pay Agent’s approach fails to account for different skill levels that private and public workers may possess in seemingly similar jobs. More specifically, there is evidence that the federal government hires workers at higher positions than they could hold in the private sector and then promotes them more quickly as well. This means, for example, that a senior accountant in government might qualify only as a junior accountant in the private sector.

What’s AEI saying?

The federal government needs to fill some jobs. But it offers salaries that are less than the salaries that a person doing a similar job could get in the private sector.
Naturally, this means that the federal government ends up attracting less-experienced applicants.
Hiring is then done from this less-experienced pool.
And since the people who are hired are doing jobs they’d be [initially] underqualified for in the private sector, they are making more money than they would be in the private sector.
CONCLUSION: federal workers are overpaid!

Would higher federal salaries attract more experience — and then would public / private pay be more equal in the eyes of conservative groups like AEI? Probably not — this argument about public sector employees isn’t about pay equity anyway. This is just more of what Robert Reich calls “The Republican Strategy,” which is – in part:

The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class – pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don’t believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.

By splitting working America along these lines, Republicans hope to deflect attention from the big story. That’s the increasing share of total income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent while the jobs and wages of everyone else languish.

Divide and conquer for fun and profit.

Private Jobs Increase More With Democrats in White House — The BGOV Barometer shows that since Democrat John F. Kennedy took office in January 1961, non-government payrolls in the U.S. swelled by almost 42 million jobs under Democrats, compared with 24 million for Republican presidents, according to Labor Department figures. Democrats hold the edge though they occupied the Oval Office for 23 years since Kennedy’s inauguration, compared with 28 for the Republicans. Through April 2012, Democratic presidents accounted for an average of 150,000 additional private-sector paychecks per month over that period, more than double the 71,000 average for Republicans. – Bloomberg

Romney economics: fire people for the simple crime of working in government

NOTE TO ALL GOVERNMENT WORKERS: Mitt Romney hates you.

Jed Lewison points out the alarmingly stupid lie that Mitt Romney told his audience in Craig, Colorado last week:

That stimulus he put in place, it didn’t help private sector jobs, it helped preserve government jobs, and the one place we should have cut back was on government jobs. We have a 145,000 more government workers under this president. Let’s send them home and put you back to work!

Mitt Romney’s 145,000 claim isn’t accurate, but even if it were, it’s amazing that Romney believes firing tens of thousands of Americans would be good for the economy. The way Romney puts it, firing public sector workers would create jobs in the private sector, but that’s nonsense. The economy isn’t zero-sum game: You don’t need to fire someone to create a job. In fact, every time someone loses their job, no matter whether they are in the private or public sector, the economy as a whole takes a hit.

But Romney’s crazy economic theory is not even grounded in reality—under Obama, public sector employment has dropped, while private sector employment has grown. Obama signed the stimulus in February of 2009. Since then, public sector employment has dropped by 608,000.Private sector employment, meanwhile, has increased by 760,000. Even if you just look at federal employment (which is but a small fraction of the overall public sector workforce), only 26,000 jobs have been added, a slower pace of growth than in the private sector.

Just as Paul Krugman recently said, Obama’s actually “been the one who’s been doing what Republicans say is the right answer:”

Just over three years into Reagan’s first term, government jobs grew by 3.1 percent; at the same time during Obama’s tenure, they’ve been cut by 2.7 percent. Hundreds of thousands of public sector jobs have been shed in recent years. Government jobs also grew under President George W. Bush, which helped keep unemployment down during most of his two terms. “After there was a recession under Ronald Reagan, government employment went way up. It went up after the recessions under the first George Bush and the second George Bush.”

FACT: The only time government employment has gone DOWN during a recession has been under Obama.

Romney is using the old “Republican Strategy” on the GOP’s working class, trailer park dwelling base voters — all of whom have been conditioned to believe that if others have something they don’t (like a job with a living wage), it’s because those ‘others’ have taken something away from them personally. How else are you going to justify to people who will never be rich, who are living paycheck to paycheck, that the wealthiest need more money and they will need to get by on less?

It would seem Romney has some kind of personal vendetta for public sector workers. Mitt’s worth about $250 million and has said federal workers make more than him. Despite all of this, how many working and middle class conservatives will vote for him anyway? (ALL of them.)

It’s absurd that Romney doesn’t know the federal government DOES, in fact, pay for teachers, firefighters and cops — “That’s a very strange accusation,” Romney said on “Fox & Friends.” “Of course, teachers and firemen and policemen are hired at the local level and also by states. The federal government doesn’t pay for teachers, firefighters or policemen. So obviously that is completely absurd.” In fact, the federal government spends huge amounts of money to support all those professions. […] In all, the federal government pays for nearly 11 percent of the country’s public school costs. Uncle Sam also funds thousands of police jobs ever since the Community Oriented Policing Services program was created in 1994. […] The feds have doled out less for firefighters, but the money is still substantial. – HuffPo

NOTE TO ROMNEY: the federal government does fund teachers, firefighters and police – Romney’s comment demonstrates a disturbing lack of understanding of both federal funding and his own published plans. While it is true that teachers, firefighters, and police are hired at the local level, a significant portion of their funding, recruiting, and training comes from the federal government. Here are just some of the ways the federal government funds: continue reading – Think Progress

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) was happy to back up Romney’s position: “It is not the responsibility of the federal government … to send money down to state government so that state governments don’t have to make tough decisions about balancing their budgets. We all admire police officers, firefighters and teachers. The decision about how many of those folks to have rests in the hands of state and local governments.” […] A McConnell spokesman did not immediately answer a question about whether the minority leader thought it was time to stop federal spending under Title 1, IDEA, COPS and the SAFER program. – HuffPo

Flip-flop alert! Romney doesn’t want to argue against hiring cops. Now what? — You can see Romney trying various gambits to escape the logic of his position. First he says the federal government “doesn’t” pay for the cost of hiring those workers. That’s generally true, though in a massive economic crisis, state and local governments see their revenues collapse and their costs rise. Since they have to balance their budget and the federal government doesn’t, giving them temporary aid makes sense so that state and local government cutbacks don’t worsen the economic crisis. Romney wants to essentially push the question out of bounds — borrowing money to hire back cops and teachers may sound nice, but the government can’t do it, so fuggedaboutit. But, of course, the federal government obviously can borrow money to help strapped state and local governments. –Jonathan Chait

Fox “News” disappears Romney’s attack on Teacher, Firefighter, and Police Hiring

Fox & Friends is shielding Mitt Romney from scrutiny after the GOP presidential candidate suggested that we don’t need “more firemen, more policemen, more teachers,” selectively editing an interview with Obama campaign advisor David Axelrod to excise out his criticism of what Romney said. In doing so, Fox avoided a discussion of the merits of Romney’s comments: that we should not address or rectify the severe and unusual loss of public sector jobs or a conversation about how public sector job losses are hurting the overall economy. –MMFA

Romney Mocks Stimulus For Saving Jobs –When Mitt Romney mocks the Obama Administration for using stimulus funds to “protect government,” who he’s really attacking is police, firefighters, and teachers. The overwhelming majority of stimulus funds distributed to the states were used to prevent layoffs of public employees. Over 3 million public employees were in danger of losing their jobs following the onset of the recession, but the stimulus afforded states the funds they needed to avoid handing out massive amounts of pink slips. Pink slips that would have gone to police, firefighters, and teachers. As far as Romney is concerned, if you are a public employee then you are a leech, and he thinks you should be out of a job. Ensuring that you lose your job as an employee of the state is now a centerpiece of his campaign. As far as he’s concerned, the money used to employ you would be put to better use by passing another tax cut for himself. That’s not conjecture or hyperbole. That is his platform. – JM Ashby

Romney bashes stimulus, then fundraises in the home of a stimulus recipient – Romney will spend Tuesday night at a $10,000-a-head fundraiser at the house of Orrin H Ingram II, Chairman of the Ingram Barge Company — which received $130,000 in federal stimulus money. Ingram Barge Company is a private company, not a government entity. – Think Progress

image: reagan-was-a-horrible-president

President Obama: Debt, deficits were ‘baked into the cake’ with Bush’s tax cuts and the wars – “I love it when these guys talk about debt and deficits,” Obama told supporters in Baltimore. “I inherited a trillion dollar deficit. We signed two trillion dollars in spending cuts into law,” Obama said. “Spending under my administration has grown more slowly than under any president in 60 years.” Obama said that the country’s budget deficits and big debt were the result of the George W. Bush’s two tax cuts, as well as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. “They baked all this stuff into the cake with those tax cuts… and the war,” Obama said. “It’s like somebody goes to a restaurant, orders a big steak dinner, a martini and all that stuff, then just as you’re sitting down they leave and accuse you of running up the tab,” Obama said – POLITICO

George W. Bush’s Tab – When you check reality, rather than the alternate universe constantly created by Fox News and an amnesiac press, you find that Bush had a chance to pay off all our national debt before we hit the financial crisis – giving the US enormous flexibility in intervening to ameliorate the recession. Instead, we had to find money for a stimulus in a cupboard stripped bare – its contents largely given away, by an act of choice. I’m tired of being told we cannot blame Bush for our current predicament. We can and should blame him for most of it – and remind people that Romney’s policies: more tax cuts, more defense spending are identical. With one difference: Bush pledged never “to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.” — Andrew Sullivan

The Fiscal Legacy of George W. Bush – Putting all the numbers in the C.B.O. report together, we see that continuation of tax and budget policies and economic conditions in place at the end of the Clinton administration would have led to a cumulative budget surplus of $5.6 trillion through 2011 – enough to pay off the $5.6 trillion national debt at the end of 2000. Tax cuts and slower-than-expected growth reduced revenues by $6.1 trillion and spending was $5.6 trillion higher, a turnaround of $11.7 trillion. Of this total, the C.B.O. attributes 72 percent to legislated tax cuts and spending increases, 27 percent to economic and technical factors. Of the latter, 56 percent occurred from 2009 to 2011. — Bruce Bartlett

Claims that President Obama’s policies have hurt businesses are greatly exaggerated

“Let’s start with the idea that the Obama administration sees businesses as piggybanks. Since 1950, corporate tax receipts have averaged 2.7 percent of GDP. In the Obama years, they’ve averaged 1.16 percent of GDP… Going forward, the Obama administration’s budget envisions corporate tax receipts rebounding to about 2.4 percent of GDP — again, beneath their historical average… After taxes, corporate profits amounted to 6.9 percent of GDP in 2010 — their highest level since 1966… That’s a mighty odd outcome for an administration that supposedly sees the existence of private businesses as an unpleasant side effect of the government’s need for tax revenues, don’t you think?” — Ezra Klein

How Obama’s ‘Doing Fine’ Gaffe May Help Him – Americans may hate the idea of government in the abstract, but they like it in the specific. The Republican strategy is always to keep its discussion of government programs general — with a handful of exceptions, like foreign aid and programs that help the poor — while Democrats try to make it as specific as possible. Firing police officers, firefighters, and teachers is way less popular than firing government bureaucrats. Obama has taken great care to turn the question into one of those specific job categories, and Romney has inadvertently helped him. Also, and perhaps more important, the entire controversy has fixed the attention of the news media on the very point that Obama was trying to make: There are many fewer government employees now than there were when Obama took office. Romney is trying to attack Obama for changing his mind on the merits of this fact, but in so doing he is helping to drive home the very existence of this fact. […] What’s more, this debate fulfills a second goal of Obama’s: to place himself in opposition to the economic status quo. The broader purpose of his Friday press conference was to remind America that he has an economic plan that Republicans won’t enact. Romney’s general strategy is to force Obama to own everything that has happened to the economy, even those things that have happened over his opposition. Now Romney is endorsing the status quo, and Obama is against it. That is surely the opposite of what Romney wants. — Jonathan Chait

Federal, state, and local spending all fell under Obama

Batemanimation: Mitt vs Jobs

Transcript Via DailyKos: And we’re gonna take back this country and get America working again. (applause) And his answer for economic vitality, by the way, was of course pushing aside the private sector, which he said is doing fine. Instead, he wants to add more to government. He wants another stimulus, he wants to hire more government workers. He says we need more firemen, more policemen, more teachers. Did he not get the message of Wisconsin? The American people did. It’s time for us to cut back on government and help the American people. (applause)

(Source: underthemountainbunker.com)

Mitt Romney wants to ‘trickle down’ all over you and tell you it’s raining

Taking a break from mocking the president for wanting to retain teachers, cops, and firefighters, Romney talked about his plans for massive financial deregulation and more tax cuts for the wealthy – which, he says, would make America the most attractive place in the world for job creators:

“It’s not just because I love job creators, it’s because I love jobs,” Romney said. “I want more good jobs for the American people and I want such competition for good, hard workers that salaries and wages go up so people make more money. I want to help the middle class of America and I’m going to do it.”

We already know that Mitt wants you to believe that firing even more public sector employees will magically free up a huge number of “good” private sector jobs. In case you weren’t aware, that’s how middle class employment works apparently. All those teachers, cops, and firefighters — or any public sector worker, really — are somehow hogging all the other jobs that could be created by the kind, gentle wealthy folks in the private sector. They’re holding back the job creators!

So Romney’s ‘vision’ is that the job creators are just waiting for more government workers to be fired. Then, jobs! Of course, they also need bigger tax cuts — and they’ll need some relief from all this ridiculous government regulation. But then, definitely, this’ll be a wonderland for job creators. We’ll have so many good jobs, we’ll be knee deep in jobs. We’ll have jobs coming out of our ears!

Here’s an observation on Romney’s vision from a NY Times editorial this morning:

“There is no meaningful difference between the trickle-down economics of George W. Bush, rejected by the country in 2008, and the plans supported by Mr. Romney and his Republican allies in Congress. All the elements are there, from the slavish devotion to tax cuts for the rich, to a contempt for government regulation, to savage cutbacks in programs for those at the bottom.”

How’d that work out for Bush? “[P]ainfully slow job growth was followed by a recession that shed nine million jobs.” Oh, that’s right.

In a Romney administration, instead of depending on big government, you’d be rescued by private sector volunteers, like Paul Ryan, who will personally come to your devastated town and wash your already clean pots.

Stephen Colbert

(via leftish)

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