[blahblahblah]

The average (mean) is useless as a measure of central tendency when applied to a data set with outliers. Salary data has a highly skewed distribution with no shortage of outliers. If the author wanted to be credible, they should have compared apples with apples (federal employees vs. private sector employees with similar education/credentials) and printed the median pay of the two groups, or better yet, plot two histograms. As written, the article comes off as being the work of a know-nothing with an axe to grind.