[rayiner]

The article talks about average federal pay versus average private sector pay, but that makes no sense. The government doesn't have a lot of customer-facing retail positions and the like, and does have a lot of professional positions (lawyers, economists, scientists, accountants, engineers, etc).

Also, within many (but not all, obviously) occupations, the government tends to hire more qualified people than average because they deal with complex work. Federal accountants aren't handling the work of some 50-person small business, they're auditing the tax returns of multi-billion dollar international corporations. Federal lawyers aren't handling some old guy's will, they're overseeing multi-billion dollar transactions.