[mkramlich]

Sounds like an apples-to-oranges comparison. So many differences between the public employment sector and private. To pick just one example, probably the top pay for a government worker in any branch appears to be somewhere on the order of $100-200k (not sure exactly but I'd be shocked if it's 10x that much). But in the private sector, clearly the top pay (CEO's, hedge fund owners, entertainers and athletes) seems to be in the $100m range. That's a factor of 1000 difference at the top. So this is bound to throw off the averages. (They did say average, therefore mean, and not median.) And of course also in the private sector there are certain employment areas like farm work and restaurant workers where the pay is at or below minimum wage, some of which to illegal aliens and under-the-table cash pay that isn't counted. I'd be surprised if anybody that works directly for the government gets as low as minimum wage for anything. Plus add the fact that the mix/distribution of jobs in government is going to be totally different than in the private sector (eg., no strippers or baseball players work for the government) and they're making a truly apples-to-oranges comparison, and the conclusions they're implying are invalid.