Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Highly Paid Federal Workers Making $150,000 Or More Increases More Than 10 Times In Just 5 Years

"The number of federal workers earning $150,000 or more a year has soared tenfold in the past five years and doubled since President Obama took office, a USA TODAY analysis finds (see chart above).  Federal workers earning $150,000 or more make up 3.9% of the workforce, up from 0.4% in 2005.

The fast-growing pay of federal employees has captured the attention of fiscally conservative Republicans who won control of the U.S. House of Representatives in last week's elections. Already, some lawmakers are planning to use the lame-duck session that starts Monday to challenge the president's plan to give a 1.4% across-the-board pay raise to 2.1 million federal workers."

5 Comments:

At 11/10/2010 9:14 AM, Blogger Ironman said...

Using this tool, which models the distribution of federal employee salaries, setting $150,000 as the floor an $1,000,000 as the ceiling (which is way above the highest actual pay for a federal government employee), we estimate there are roughly 76,157 federal employees making more than $150,000. For a federal workforce of an estimated 2.15 million, that works out to be 3.5% - pretty close to what USA Today found!

Not bad for a model based upon the actual distribution of all federal workers' salaries named "Smith" that we threw together back in January!

 
At 11/10/2010 10:32 AM, Blogger Hydra said...

The market suggests that if you want good people you have to pay for them.


================================


" and doubled since President Obama took office"

This makes it SOUND as if the problem is much worse since OBAMA took office without offering evidence. For all we can tell from this statement alone the number of high paid employees may have doubled every year for the past five years.

I object to this kind of linguistic and statistic behavior whether it comes form the left or the right.

But we have more information, so now we can calulate that to go from 0.4 employees then years ago to 3.9 employees in five years, doubling the number in the last year, then on average you would have increased the number of high paid employees by 1.48 times every year for the previous four years.


I would conclude that the previous administration felt there was a long term need to increase the number of such employees, and the Obama admisnistration only stepped up the pace.

If you think these highly paid people are managers then 3.9% stlll seems kind of slim for a highly diversified organization like the government. If they only had to do one job, like manufacture bicycles, 3.9% might be high.

 
At 11/10/2010 10:37 AM, Blogger Hydra said...

Since we don't know what the curve of hiring patterns looks like, we COULD assume that the numbers were seriously depleted and Bush made a big push to increase them in his last year.

In that case, doubling the numbers under Obama would result in a REDUCTION in the pace of hiring.


just saying.....

 
At 11/10/2010 3:17 PM, Blogger juandos said...

"This makes it SOUND as if the problem is much worse since OBAMA took office without offering evidence"...

Yeah hydra that was also something I was wondering about myself...

I wonder if Jan. of 2007 would be an interesting starting point to see if more of the $150K paid employees started to blossom out?
(Democrats take control of both houses of Congress)

Or maybe Jan. of 2006?
(medicare part d goes into effect)...

Or Jan. of 2002?
(No Child Left Behind Act goes into effect)

Again ironman thanks for the great info you have a habit of passing along...

Good stuff sir!

 
At 11/15/2010 11:15 AM, Blogger Jason said...

But I thought the federal government and the stimulus did not create jobs?

 

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