Quote (JayKwik @ May 23 2013 09:18pm)
This is always an incredibly silly argument, but it always seems to come back around eventually. The government employs hundreds of thousands of engineers, scientists, and doctors to name a few professions and many of them tend to work for less compensation than they would gain by not working for the government. I got to see this firsthand when my wife did government work, and while she earned a little more at the time than the $100,000 you're griping about she regularly made 3x that amount doing similar work in private practice. The government also employs the entire U.S. military, which is usually exempt from any across-the-board attempt to in any way alter federal pay.
Attempting to demonize what federal workers earn is stupid in our current budget climate. We saw this at the end of 2010 when Congress forced Obama into accepting another pay freeze for federal workers. The projected savings was a paltry $2 billion/year and the decision came at the same time that the body was debating whether or not to throw another tax cut to the top 1%, which would cost $70 billion/year. And of course they did both (net loss of $68 billion/year for everybody who's mathematically challenged) on the way to extending those ill-conceived tax cuts at large (at the cost of $800 billion+/decade), while we were still running trillion-dollar deficits at the time caused largely by dumb tax policy centered around those very tax cuts.
If you want to make spending cuts then do it on tax expenditures that favor only corporations and the affluent. When you freeze federal pay the deficit doesn't change and a couple of million people have less money to fuel our consumption-based economy, and lowering federal pay is even dumber than freezing it.
The kids here are pro big business and anti government, even though the government workers do far more for them than cola cola, and coca cola doesnt give a shit about a single one of them.