Are Wisconsin Public Employees Underpaid?
Ezra Klein and a variety of other thoughtful liberal bloggers have been pointing to an Economic Policy Institute analysis that they claim demonstrates that Wisconsin’s public employees, even after adjusting for benefits and hours worked, face a ” compensation penalty of 5% for choosing to work in the public sector.” Unfortunately, when you get under the hood, the study shows no such thing.
Klein links to an executive summary to support his claim, but reading the actual paper by Jeffrey H. Keefe is instructive. Keefe took a representative sample of Wisconsin workers, and built a regression model that relates “fundamental personal characteristics and labor market skills” to compensation, and then compared public to private sector employees, after “controlling” for these factors. As far as I can see, the factors adjusted for were: years of education; years of experience; gender; race; ethnicity; disability; size of organization where the employee works; and, hours worked per year. Stripped of jargon, what Keefe asserts is that, on average, any two individuals with identical scores on each of these listed characteristics “should” be paid the same amount.
But consider Bob and Joe, two hypothetical non-disabled white males, each of whom went to work at Kohl’s Wisconsin headquarters in the summer of 2000, immediately after graduating from the University of Wisconsin. They have both remained there ever since, and each works about 50 hours per week. Bob makes $65,000 per year, and Joe makes $62,000 per year. Could you conclude that Joe is undercompensated versus Bob? Do you have enough information to know the “fundamental personal characteristics and labor market skills” of each to that degree of precision? Suppose I told you that Bob is an accountant, and Joe is a merchandise buyer.
Even if Bob and Joe are illustrative stand-ins for large groups of employees for whom idiosyncratic differences should average out, if there are systematic differences in the market realities of the skills, talents, work orientation and the like demanded by accountants as compared to buyers, then I can’t assert that either group is underpaid or overpaid because the average salary is 5% different between these two groups.
And this hypothetical example considers people with a degree from the same school working in the same industry at the same company in the same town, just in different job classifications. Keefe is considering almost any full-time employee in Wisconsin with the identical years of education, race, gender, etc. as providing labor of equivalent market value, whether they are theoretical physicists, police officers, retail store managers, accountants, salespeople, or anything else. Whether they work in Milwaukee, Madison, or a small town with a much lower cost of living. Whether their job is high-stress or low-stress. Whether they face a constant, realistic risk of being laid off any given year, or close to lifetime employment. Whether their years of education for the job are in molecular biology, or the sociology of dance. Whether they do unpredictable shift work in a factory, or 9 – 5 desk work in an office with the option to telecommute one day per week.
Keefe claims – without adjusting for an all-but infinite number of such relevant potential differences between the weight-average public sector worker and the weight-average private sector worker – that his analysis is precise enough to ascribe a 5% difference in compensation to a public sector compensation “penalty.”
And his use of the statistical tests that he claims show that the total public-private compensation gap is “statistically significant” are worse than useless; they are misleading. The whole question – as is obvious even to untrained observers – is whether or not there are material systematic differences between the public and private employee that are not captured by the list of coefficients in his regression model. His statistical tests simply assume that there are not.
I don’t know if Wisconsin’s public employees are underpaid, overpaid, or paid just right. But this study sure doesn’t answer the question.
(Cross-Posted at The Corner)
How is this different from the way any other statistical analysis is done? You collect a large enough amount of data in the hopes that individuals average out, and you try to control for as many factors as you can think of.
You can criticize specific points (e.g. cost of living, type of education) which may be relevant or not (does the cost of living vary significantly across Wisconsin? Are public sector employees humanities majors that shouldn’t be compared to engineers?) but calling the results invalid just because there must be some other factors the author hadn’t thought of is basically invalidates all economic statistics ever cited.
— Yariv · Feb 22, 05:23 PM · #
I think you misunderstand the study. They don’t need to control for specific job as it’s looking at a cross section of jobs and comparing the overall difference in wage.
They also break it down by specific job type, and comment on how the differential is greatest for doctors, lawyers. They also comment on how the state does have higher salaries than the private sector at the low end of experience due to compensation floors which are in place
this study may not be the final word, but the complaints you make against it don’t seem to make statistical sense
— David · Feb 22, 06:50 PM · #
Really? Statistical comparisons use averages not individuals.You should know that BEFORE posting an opinion.
— powers · Feb 22, 07:00 PM · #
I find it somewhat ironic that you are criticizing a study that attempts to do a (relatively) honest, total compensation comparison between public and private sector employees, as the usual division between left and right on this issue is for the left to emphasize wages to show public-sector under-compensation, while the right tends to emphasize total compensation to show public-sector over-compensation.
Any relatively honest analysis of total compensation would endeavor to compare apples to apples, in terms of job descriptions, job qualifications, and experience. While I think that including race, gender, and disability in the model is probably inappropriate for the exercise at hand (if you want to compare total compensation levels, why would you want to control for descriptive characteristics that are not job related?), comparing on the bases of education levels, hours worked and experience are appropriate proxies for more detailed, but unavailable, matches between jobs. Additionally, controlling for the size of the enterprise also makes sense on the private side, as it is pretty well known that small businesses often do not provide many of the fringe benefits that large enterprises offer their employees.
Further, the results seem not at all novel: Low-education, low-skill public sector employees are better compensated than are their private sector peers, whereas high-education, high-skill public sector workers are not as well compensated (but, traditionally, have enjoyed high levels of certainty about their future compensation and low year-to-year variances).
— brianS · Feb 22, 07:04 PM · #
Your extrapolation from the whole to the individual is deceptive. Of course there will be minor pay discrepancies between individuals of equal talent and experience in different fields, but the law of large numbers says these even out.
When you have a sample of thousands on both sides, and one group has a measurable advantage over another, then there is a discrepancy.
Even if both groups were equally pay, how does this justify a 12% pay cut as Walker is pushing for? The 5% gap now is approaching 20%, or to use your analogy, Bob still makes $65k but Joe now makes $54k, or $11k less than his equally talented buddy.
— Leo · Feb 22, 07:06 PM · #
How does one factor in the fact that the average teacher is responsible for the care, supervision, training, and future well being of anywhere from 50 to a couple of hundred of our children each year? I’m not a teacher, I’m a computer geek, but I have served as a scout leader for many years, and I can tell you that even in that small capacity working with kids, being responsible for them, keeping them interested, trying to help them become good people is a hell of a lot harder than writing database queries or designing a Web site. A good teacher is worth a hell of a lot more than the ex-CEO of Lotus.
— Michael · Feb 22, 07:11 PM · #
Thanks for the comments.
Yariv,
I have been critical of the capability of econometric methods in many domains, at length. Identifying obvious, plausible drivers not considered in an analysis is a fairly standard critique.
David,
Not if there are systematic differences in the mix of jobs between the public and private groups.
brianS:
My criticism is not that the included variables are inappropriate, but that omitted variable bias is plausibly enormous compared to the estimated effect.
Leo,
Not if there is systematic bias between the groups.
— Jim Manzi · Feb 22, 07:12 PM · #
Hmm. So your comparison of two fictional entities undercuts a large comparison of actual working people?
Gosh. Statisticians must be impressed. This made up account is so much less costly than all those surveys of real people.
— John Q · Feb 22, 07:17 PM · #
This is really becoming nonsensical. Try looking at their lifestyle and tell me if it meets expectations. Do we want teachers to be able to afford a good place to live, reliable transportation, good quality health care, and a decent retirement? If we do, then maybe it is time we stopped looking at their compensation relative to the private sector, and judged it on its own merits. And if that is the case, then perhaps we should also determine if maybe private sector employees are underpaid. Considering how much wealth the big corporations and banks are sitting on right now, I think there is definitely some argument to be made that the private workforce is worse off than they should be, at least for main line workers.
— Corwin · Feb 22, 07:24 PM · #
It may be selfish, but I hope the public employees don’t realize they’re underpaid.
What will happen when they all quit to take jobs that they like equally well but pay them more?
— J Mann · Feb 22, 07:26 PM · #
Of course, by the same logic in this article the supposed omitted variable bias could mean that the study significantly UNDER-estimates the absolute difference in pay. What is here is lazy thinking. Make a case about what direction the bias is likely to be. Just saying, thing are left out, it could be the opposite, is not productive. Just because it is “standard critique” does not mean it is a useful one.
— Regressed to the Mean · Feb 22, 07:29 PM · #
You give a couple of hypothetical situations which raise legitimate questions about those pairs of hypothetical people, then try to claim those questions override a factual statistical analysis?
Wow – talk about twisting facts to suit one’s purposes. You know how newspapers have to label ads with “advertisement”? I don’t know what your label would be, but it certainly wouldn’t be “straight-forward 100% truth.”
— TommyBoy · Feb 22, 07:39 PM · #
I refer people once again to my humorously phrased observation, above. Now that it is statistically proven that public employees could be making more money at jobs they like equally well, I fear for the coming stampede.
The only employees we will have left are ones too stupid to accept statistical proof, which means we’ll be left with the dregs!
— J Mann · Feb 22, 07:50 PM · #
Wow, Jim Manzi, you seem to have a very incomplete understanding of that which you critique. Don’t worry, you’re not alone in today’s America! Beck, Limbaugh, Palin, Joe the Plumber, Kristol, Wallace, O’Reilly, etc., etc., and now you, all seem to act like willful ignorant teenagers—ranting against things that you won’t take the time to understand.
All you have is passion (which teenagers also have in spades!), while you ignore any facts that you can’t really understand (which is a lot of them).
Ignorance doesn’t carry as much weight as knowledge. Educate yourself about statistics before you start ranting stupidly about them. Remember the famous Twain quote?…
— Poorer Richard · Feb 22, 07:59 PM · #
Ok, I sort of get your “systemic differences” however I think it’s rather unlikely that it could cause a problem with the data.
He breaks down the fields included:
Management, business, and financial
Professional and related
Sales and related
Office and administrative support
Service
Construction
Installation, maintenance, and repair
Production
Transportation and material moving
if you really think there are large systemic differences between the private and public sectors in those fields then I think you could study and present a case, but I don’t think it’s likely to bear much fruit.
I think most of your assertion comes from the false belief that public workers are never fired. While teachers and some groups may be more protected than most, at least at the federal level their firing rates are pretty comparable to the private sector.
— David · Feb 22, 08:27 PM · #
The EPI study (and ones like it) have a more obvious flaw: public employees are given large incentives to “credentialize” (add additional degrees in mid-career, often at public expense); private sector employees, on the other hand, generally try to hire on the cheap (eg. “Give me the someone who can do the job—I don’t care if my efficiency expert has a masters degree”).
If there were some absolute correlation between advanced degrees and worker productivity, one could argue that state and local governments were still getting their moneys worth. That’s not our world. in the public sector this sort of credentialization is basically a job benefit (I get time off from work so I can get my masters in teaching—or administration, or communications—so I can make more money).
From the standpoint of efficiency, state governments might review whether there is any advantage, for instance, to having more than a bachelors degree when it comes to a range of jobs (including being a teacher at the high school level). But this brings us back to the essential problem—in the public sector it’s difficult to gauge and reward productivity.
— Kevin · Feb 22, 08:31 PM · #
If I may make a political point: The purpose of the public sector is NOT “to provide jobs at wages equivalent to private sector jobs.” The purpose of the public sector is to provide government services as deemed appropriate by the voters. If the voters wish to pay public sector workers at wage levels lower than equivalent private sector jobs, then so be it.
— tanstaafl · Feb 22, 09:35 PM · #
J Mann wrote:
It may be selfish, but I hope the public employees don’t realize they’re underpaid.
What will happen when they all quit to take jobs that they like equally well but pay them more?
J Mann, no self-respecting public sector union member or teacher will take a job that pays more. You see, they do their work because they are good people, not for wages and benefits like the rest of us; they care about the children, public service, making a difference, making the world a better place, and…for the children, did I mention the children?…
As that old FDR WPA labor song went…Nice Work If You Can Get It…
Or as one union worker said to me as I tried to cross the picket line: nice work, but if you try to take it, I’ll knock your f***ing block off
— jd · Feb 22, 09:43 PM · #
Jim: The article never presents the actual models being estimated, nor discusses diagnostics, so I can’t assess whether they did the appropriate misspecification tests for evidence of omitted variable bias. Did they do a RESET test? Who knows? You are making a pretty strong argument.
Every model is wrong, but each is wrong in its own way. It would be fairer of you to lament the lack of methodological discussion in this paper, such that you lack confidence in the results. You have no way of knowing whether there is significant bias here, nor in which direction it lies.
@Kevin: Regarding incentives to “credentialize”, you must be familiar with a different source of public employment than am I. While many civil service jobs include educational requirements in their MQs, state employment with which I am familiar has almost no money for training of any sort. The training dollars that I spend for my staff are to help them perform their current jobs more effectively and efficiently. That training may make the individuals more competitive for other, higher-paying jobs, but only because they are more productive employees. Isn’t that an appropriate use for training dollars — to make an employee more productive?
@tanstaafl. You are of course correct. And your point is not particularly relevant to the empirical question at hand.
— brianS · Feb 22, 09:44 PM · #
David wrote:
While teachers and some groups may be more protected than most, at least at the federal level their firing rates are pretty comparable to the private sector.
I don’t believe that. Can you back that up with some data? You hinted at the truth that teacher firing rates are so low they can’t really be called rates. They’re more appropriately called incidents or maybe lawsuits. I think it’s laughable to believe that federal union firing rates are anywhere near the private sector.
— jd · Feb 22, 09:55 PM · #
@brianS – you make a good point.
I’ve read several of Jim’s posts about the limitations of statistical modeling. I’m not convinced that Keefe’s research is a good example of that. It seems to me that this is a perfectly suitable question to be addressed using this type of approach, but it is impossible to determine whether Keefe’s specific models have been properly specified without more details on what was actually done.
I don’t believe EPI papers are peer-reviewed in any strict sense. That does leave me suspicious.
— Al · Feb 22, 09:55 PM · #
brianS _
tanstaafl. You are of course correct. And your point is not particularly relevant to the empirical question at hand._But it is relevant to the issue at hand. It’s like a bunch of people have been arguing over whether the emperor’s sleeves are cut too long, too short, or just right. Then along comes tanstaafl, who points out that the emperor is wearing no clothes.
— The Reticulator · Feb 22, 11:20 PM · #
Forgive me but since a burocracy doesn’t use a free market price system, I find a little bit useless such kind of studies to justify wage setting. It doesn’t answer why people chose an undercompensated job or why they don’t apply for a job in private sector. Without being a statistician, I find hard to explain how is possible in a market economy to undercompensate systematically and for a long time a whole class of workers without occurring in phenomena like exagerate turnover,lazyness, or corruption (in case of pubblic officiers), etc.
When I started working in my bank (in Florence, Italy) 15 years ago the entry level wage was significantly above the market because of unions and because banking system has been higly regulated for a long time. Even requiring a university degree for a simple job like cashier, usually there were from 5 up to 15 appliances for every vacation. Now that unions lost power and job market is a little bit more competitive, these facts don’t happen.
On the other side is possible to have underpaid public workers, but often they are too many and sometimes they are hired just for political consensus lowering artificially unemployement. A peculiar feature of public sector is that in time of crisis is more easy to cut spending in a linear way than to dismiss workers. In Spain and Portugal salaries have been generally reduced of -5% and in Italy has been frozen for 3 years. Retiring requirements have been raised almost everywhere in Europe. Without a profit & loss mechanism the only instrument avaible are laws or decrees and the only parameter is the size of budget.
— Silvano Fait · Feb 22, 11:28 PM · #
Regressed to the Mean,
Hence the penultimate sentence in the post:
The paper made an affirmative claim: Wisconsin’s public workers suffer a compensation penalty as a result of being in the public sector.
TommyBoy,
That wasn’t exactly my argument.
Poorer Richard,
I’m reasonably comfortable with my knowledge of statistics.
David,
The paper made an affirmative argument that a causal effect had been demonstrated. I gave a realistic example of systematic bias between two employment classifications within the first of the general classifications on your list, within the private sector, within a single company, within a single location. If the author claims to have “shown” that his claim is true, the burden is on him.
Obviously, for any productive debate, it’s not useful to say “but what about the possibility that magic elf fairies did it – you haven’t ruled that out.” But the potential for a 5% systematic comp difference driven by systematic differences between private and public sector jobs strikes me as extremely plausible. Once again, not demonstrated, but something that a responsible analyst would have to address before making a claim of demonstrated causality.
Finally, you say that:
I expressed no opinion about this, but raised relative job security as an example of a plausible difference between the public and private groups in this sample. (As an aside, I understand that a majority of the public employee sample were teachers, whom I would not assume to be comparable to federal employees on this dimension).
Kevin,
I agree that this is a potential issue. It is one of a very long list of reasons why it is rhetorical to call the difference between earnings of people with and without degree X a “wage premium.” By convention, we can use this term, but it insinuates causality, when all that is shown is correlation.
brianS:
As someone who creates software used to estimate and model causal effects, truer words were never spoken.
The question of systematic difference between the kind of work done in the public sector (on average) and the private sector (on average) is the crucial issue in this debate, both from a technical and a lay perspective. Saying (and I simplify here for effect)“look, a college graduate makes less when working for the government than when working for a private company” doesn’t go to the open issue, at all. The author is specific that his analytical strategy isn’t even to try to match like jobs with like jobs. From the paper:
…
Unless the author did something completely different than what is described as the methodology, I think I’m being fair.
Finally, you say that:
Hence the penultimate sentence in the post:
The paper made an affirmative claim: Wisconsin’s public workers suffer a compensation penalty as a result of being in the public sector.
JS Mann,
I know this is meant as a lighthearted observation, but it points to what I think is likely the only potential way out of the analytical conundrum: some kind of an empirical market test. I’ve run through a bunch in my mind, but can’t think of an obvious one (presumably if it existed, it would be used in some way to set comp).
— Jim Manzi · Feb 22, 11:33 PM · #
Jim isn’t being ideological here. He really does object to these kinds of statistical studies no matter what their conclusion.
That being said, I think he makes the perfect the enemy of the good. We could never have any empirical information about any socially important issue that would live up to his methodological standards. Which would mean that we would just rely on our ideological priors. We all do this so much as it is that I don’t think the world would be a better place without multiple regression analysis.
— Pithlord · Feb 22, 11:37 PM · #
Hmmm….. when some people wonder aloud if hedge fund managers are overpaid don’t conservatives call that class warfare?
— decklap · Feb 23, 12:29 AM · #
How can you say that a study on Wisconsin salaries doesn’t control for enough variables (and cannot possibly do so), yet declare with utter confidence that 100-year models of economic growth show how combating climate change is not cost-effective? The latter statement doesn’t account for an obvious factor: changes in atmospheric CO2 will persist for much longer than 100 years. Seems a little more important than coming up with a metric for that certain indefinable something that drives those who choose the private sector.
— Zach · Feb 23, 12:38 AM · #
@brianS “Isn’t that an appropriate use for training dollars — to make an employee more productive?”
in the private sector one has to jump through a few more hoops. Does such training lead to an actual increase in worker productivity? Would this gain justify the cost of the extra training? What if one factors in the issue of retention (ie. employees with new skills might jump ship for higher pay)?
I don’t want to knock the public sector or the people who work for it (which includes my partner, btw, though at the federal level). But—ai yi yi—there is plenty of room for skepticism here. 30% of WI’s state employees have a grad degree (as opposed to 7% among the private workforce)?
— Kevin · Feb 23, 12:39 AM · #
Jim: Well I think your critique about omitted variable bias is thoughtful, I can’t help but imagine Donald Rumsfeld here. If we have to draw some conclusions about the compensation levels in the public versus private sector, do we have a better study with a better set of ignorability assumptions?
— Robert Bell · Feb 23, 01:33 AM · #
@Kevin: and corporate America does detailed, useful, cost-benefit analyses of every expenditure by its managers? I think not. There is a reason Dilbert is so funny — because Scott Adams’ take on corporate nonsense rings so true.
Measuring and managing productivity amongst knowledge workers/service industry workers is non-trivial. That said, when I send a staff member to a training course, I’m pretty sure that training is needed.
I’m not familiar with the composition of Wisconsin’s public workforce. Does that include teachers? Or are you talking only about those in the state’s civil service?
It is my casual understanding that many states have shrunk (or slowed the growth of) their employment of low-skilled labor over the long run, in significant part by outsourcing certain functions to the private sector. This would, of course, be a parsimonious explanation of both higher average wages in the public sector (when not controlling for squat) and higher average education levels in the public sector. Further, it speaks to Jim’s concerns about a “different mix” of jobs in the private sector than the public sector, which he seems to suggest likely invalidates the EPI study’s entire exercise.
as for the meaning of the larger enterprise…there are several different conversations going on. Are Wisconsin’s public sector employees being payed “too much” or “too little”? I agree with Jim that this study can’t tell us, but I took his closing comment to be about its face value claim, not about the empirical question of whether they are paid more (or less) than roughly equivalent private-sector workers.
“Too much/little” is a value judgment. Markets don’t really make ethical value judgments. They make economic value judgments.
In order for us to have an informed debate about compensation, we need to know the facts about compensation. We can’t adequately address the value judgments about what public employees “should” be paid until we know what they “are” paid. I read this study as a relatively honest attempt to provide apples-to-apples comparisons of total compensation, where the apples are defined primarily by their knowledge levels (proxied for by education and experience). Surely, this is a much more honest and useful assessment of compensation comparability than to lump all public sector compensation together and divide by the number of employees, then compare to average private sector compensation, regardless of job?
— brianS · Feb 23, 02:22 AM · #
Michael: How does one factor in the fact that the average teacher is responsible for the care, supervision, training, and future well being of anywhere from 50 to a couple of hundred of our children each year?
That’s an excellent question, for which there exists an excellent, time-tested answer. But the left is already squealing like a stuck pig. I’d hate to hear the noise they’d make if Gov. Walker went Full Libertarian on them.
— The Reticulator · Feb 23, 02:35 AM · #
Wow Manzi, you really shouldn’t be writing about things you know nothing about. And it’s clear you don’t know the first thing about statistics.
This weak, ineffectual attempt to refute an obviously well designed study because you don’t agree with it’s conclusions, is symptomatic of the right wing’s war on all things reality based – whether it’s climate science, evolutionary biology, gender research, energy science, and now statistics!
— Sambammer · Feb 23, 02:54 AM · #
Can we all agree that Sambammer is the poster boy of the left? Please? Bipartisan agreement on this?
— The Reticulator · Feb 23, 03:12 AM · #
Let’s start with the original. It is not a research paper, it is clearly labeled as a briefing paper. I am not sure what the standards are at EPI for a briefing paper as opposed to a research paper. Let us start with the first sentence. “This paper investigates whether Wisconsin public employees are overpaid at the expense of Wisconsin taxpayers.” Let us start with a truism. Wisconsin public employees are paid by Wisconsin taxpayers. Whether Wisconsin public employees are overpaid or underpaid by Wisconsin taxpayers is not a matter of study, but a matter of preference. Let’s go on to the second sentence. “Newly sworn-in Gov. Scott Walker believes that public employee compensation must be cut to make it comparable to private sector pay at the state, local, and school levels.” Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. I am not aware of any proposal put forth by the governor that implies “public employee compensation must be cut to make it comparable to private sector pay.” The issue is what the state of Wisconsin can afford. It took to the end of the third sentence to get it right. “Walker is promoting public employee pay cuts,
changes in collective bargaining laws, major benefits reductions, and a possible decertification of public employee unions
as the antidote … to reducing the state’s budget
deficit (Bergquist and Stein 2010).” Yes we have that scholarly citation of a news article! Is it too much to ask that the content of the sentence match the article cited? Of course, the use of a news article changes this from a scholarly article to a polemic. The Keefe article is the equivalent to the phony doctor excuses passed out at the rallies to teachers so that they can strike but continue to be paid. I would respect them more if they would just say they will not do their jobs because they wanted to attend a protest and did not expect to be compensated.
— Max Regor · Feb 23, 06:31 AM · #
Sorry but it’s impossible to equate public sector employment with private sector employment. Having worked in both it’s impossible to quantify the value of sitting on your ass doin g nothing while waiting to collect your pension.
— bandit · Feb 23, 02:55 PM · #
Living in Wisc. and having spent a lot of time looking at state and local job listings, I think I can confidently say that state and local jobs require degrees (and onerous application proceedures) way more often than private sector jobs. I can think of two reasons. 1. State and local jobs are coveted becasue of the benefits (most people here believe they pay less) and requiring degrees and special training is a way to winnow the applicants. 2. A lot of the jobs are in education—the schools or universities—entities that value degrees.
— cw · Feb 23, 05:23 PM · #
I agree with you that the use of means rather than medians is a weakness in ethe EPI work. Ironically, over at teh ultra-pro-public sector bolg Economix, Catherine Rampell just put up a report by the National Employment Law Project that contains this statement in its appendix:
“We use OES wage data rather than the average wage series in the CES survey for several reasons. OES data provide median wage estimates, which are preferable to average wages; the latter are often distorted by the presence of high-wage occupations in an industry, and, the extent of that distortion varies significantly by industry.”
I also think the “size of organization” screen hugely biases the EPI’s work. Intellectually, why would one assume all public sector workers should be analogous to big private firm workers and employable in big firms? Politically, since small firms’ workers and employers are taxed to pay public sector comp, it is only fair that their pay rates be included in the comps.
— mark · Feb 23, 11:09 PM · #
Politically, since small firms’ workers and employers are taxed to pay public sector comp, it is only fair that their pay rates be included in the comps.
Especially when you consider the way big business, Establishment Republicans, and leftists have ganged up to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. The big corporatists and leftists are all Oppressors of the People. Big deal if their rates of compensation are comparable.
— The Reticulator · Feb 24, 04:37 AM · #
@Reticulator: Claiming the voters have the power to do something does not establish they have the right to do it, and it does not provide an answer to empirical data about the wisdom or prudence of any course of action. A cursory list of some of the worst lapses of the American voting public, from the many compromises with slavery to the war of aggression against Mexico to the treatment of First Nations peoples, should establish that freedom comes with responsibility. Dismissing the notion that voters ought to behave responsibly and fairly as the emperor’s new clothes amounts to a bankrupt philosophy.
— John Spragge · Feb 24, 10:44 AM · #
All I know is that if I lived in Wisconsin, I’d be very pissed off that my tax dollars are contributing to state employees viagra needs. That is clearly NOT a necessity and its certainly not my responsibility to pay for anyone’s sex life. My God. We waste so much money in this nation that its pathetic. Also, I have zero sympathy for these state employees with cushy jobs and all. Maybe its time to start outsourcing their jobs to India and China for them to realize how fragile the job market is these days. I am sure we can find some people in India to do their desk jobs for 65% less than Wisconsin tax payers pay them.
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