Cut Deficit Without Cutting Services? Start Here
By
Byron York
Chief Political Correspondent
WashingtonExaminer.com
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Whenever a conservative suggests reducing the federal deficit by cutting
spending rather than raising taxes, there's always someone to ask: Well, what
would you cut? Americans may say they want less government spending, the
argument goes, but they don't want anyone to touch their services and subsidies
and monthly checks.
Fair enough. But there's a persuasive counter-argument going around in
conservative circles these days: You can start cutting government spending
without cutting anyone's services or subsidies or monthly checks. Just bring the
pay of federal workers into line with pay in the private sector.
A recent Heritage Foundation study found the average federal worker (excluding
the uniformed military) makes $78,901 a year in wages and salary versus $50,111
for the average private sector worker. When you count generous health and
pension benefits, the average total compensation of federal workers comes to
$111,015 a year versus $60,078 in the private sector.
In recent years, that disparity has been fueled by an explosion of federal
generosity on the high end of the pay scale. For example, USA Today recently
reported that in December 2007, a total of 1,868 civilian workers in the Defense
Department earned $150,000 or more; by June 2009, the number was 10,100. In late
'07, the paper says, just one employee at the Transportation Department earned
more than $170,000. Less than two years later, 1,690 workers earned that much.
Other studies have come up with slightly different numbers. But there's no doubt
that federal pay is higher than private pay across the board, not just in the
upper brackets. If Congress were to freeze federal pay raises until the private
sector begins to catch up, the savings to taxpayers would be considerable.
Heritage scholar James Sherk estimates that ending the disparity could save the
taxpayers $47 billion a year. (A study by the American Enterprise Institute put
the figure at $40 billion.) That won't get close to balancing the budget, but
add up 10 years of that and the government will save significant money.
And it's done without cutting government services or subsidies. "In the past,
the implication was that if you are spending less, then you are doing less,"
says Grover Norquist, the conservative head of Americans for Tax Reform. "But
you could save money by paying public workers what you pay private workers and
still do the same things."
Getting to public-private pay equity need not involve a sledgehammer approach.
There are differences between the federal workforce and the private-sector
workforce that pay reformers will have to take into account.
For example, government workers are more educated, older and more likely to be
in managerial and administrative positions than the overall work force. That
means they make more money, just as comparable workers in the private sector
make more than less-skilled workers.
Reforming federal pay would take those differences into account. Highly paid
federal workers who have the skills and experience to command high pay in the
private sector would stay at the high end of the pay scale and might even see
their pay go up. But others who make far more working for the government than
they would for the private sector would likely have their pay frozen until it
was closer to private standards. Nobody's pay would be cut.
In the Senate, Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn has introduced amendments to the
war supplemental spending bill that would freeze federal pay for a year. In the
House, Republicans found a pay-freeze proposal was extremely popular with
participants in the YouCut program, which asks the public for input on how to
cut spending. When GOP leaders asked for a recorded vote on the measure,
majority Democrats promptly shot it down. Still, the GOP sees pay equity as a
winning issue. "If Republicans had thought that this was political death,"
Norquist says, "they would not have had that vote."
In the meantime, the problem is getting worse, not better. While the private
sector has shed millions of jobs in the recession, the federal government has
added nearly 200,000 employees to its rolls. That's more salaries, more benefits
and more pensions. And the pay problem is replicated in states across the
country; most of them have similar public-private disparities, and many of them
are facing calamitous budget deficits.
Pay equity between government and private workers would help solve those
problems. The next time someone asks, Well, what would you cut? -- conservatives
have an answer.
Byron York, The Examiner's chief political correspondent, can be contacted at
byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and
Friday, and his stories and blog posts appears on
ExaminerPolitics.com