Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey thinks he's onto something in his May 8 column:
Which class of full-time, year-round American workers has the highest median earnings? Is it the class that works for private-sector employers? Is it the class that works for the government? Or is it the entrepreneurial class, who are self-employed?
According to the Census Bureau's Personal Income Table 07 (PINC-07), the competition isn't close. When it comes to making money in the modern United States of America, government workers win.
Among Americans who actually earn income by working, they are the upper class.
[...]
The overall median earnings for all of these full-time year-round workers in 2017 were $48,500.
Workers in private industry, however, made less than the overall median. Their median earnings were $46,797.
The self-employed did a little better than the national rate. Their median earnings were $50,383.
But government workers did the best. Their median earnings were $53,435.
That was 14.2 percent better than private-sector workers and 6.1 percent better than the self-employed.
In trying to bash federal workers as needlessly overpaid, Jeffrey deliberately ignores critical nuance. A 2017 Congressional Budget Office report reveals facts that Jeffrey considers inconvenient: Those "upper class" earnings for federal workers are actually on the lower end of the scale.
The CBO reports that compensation for federal jobs requiring a high school education or less is notably higher than private-sector jobs requiring a similar education level. But as the job requires increasing levels of education, the federal-private differential slowly disappears until federal jobs requiring a doctorate or other professional degree are actually paid less than in the private sector.
Further, one could argue that the private sector has many more jobs requiring only a high-school education level than does government, which tend to be low-paying and may be skewing the numbers Jeffrey cites by dragging down the overall private pay level.Indeed, one study found that 54 percent of state and local government employees have a college degree, compared with 35 percent in the private sector. (Another study found that nearly 52 percent of federal workers have a college degree.)
Jeffrey then gets into even more misleading territory:
Among all the classes of workers whose median earnings were reported in the Census Bureau's Table PINC-07, the greatest disparity was between those employed in private-sector agricultural jobs and those employed by the federal government.
The median earnings of federal government workers ($66,028) were 86 percent greater than the median earnings of private-sector agricultural workers ($35,490).
The Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture has made a telling observation about one part of the labor force in the American agricultural industry.
"The share of hired crop farmworkers who were not legally authorized to work in the United States grew from roughly 14 percent in 1989-91 to 55 percent in 1999-2001," it said in a report on farm labor published online.
"Since then," says the report, "it has fluctuated around 50 percent."
While Jeffrey does concede taht the crop farmworkers are "part of the most poorly paid class of workers listed in PINC-07," but he never admits that the federal government doesn't employ farmers or cropworkers, which no doubt accounts for the huge salary differential he's decrying.
