Why Do Federal Workers Make Twice As Much As Private-Sector Workers?

Great comment left at this article (which is really just a pointer to another article.):

"The way it works in business (save for this atrocious bail-outs of the past year) is that some guys make millions and some go bankrupt and wind up with nothing. I have a company and its really up to me how much I want to take home or invest back into the company. If I screw up and take too much home then I'll be wiped out and out of business. But right now I'm trying to put my competition out of business. I'm hoping one day I can take home millions. The nice thing is that it doesn't matter to you what I do because you don't pay my salary.

My neighbor had a career in public education and takes home a $90,000/yr pension. Any investment guy will tell you you need to bank $1 million for every $20,000/yr you hope to have in retirement, without dipping into your equity. That means my well-paid employees have to save $4.5 million by the time they retire to match the school teacher next door. But I also happen to live in an area with a public pension system that is about to bust and so me and my employees are getting slammed with property taxes to pay my neighbor's public pension.

It does seem nuts to me what some Wall Street traders make a year, but I don't really care. It doesn't come out of my pocket and its none of my business. But I'm paying for all these gov't salaries and pensions and so it is very much my business what gov't workers get paid. If gov't workers don't like the pushback they're hearing, I have some good advice for them: quit. Start a company, but you better have a strong stomach for it. You can make a lot of money, but you won't know at the beginning whether you'll even survive six months. And as you're struggling and putting back the Pepto Bismal, think about all those public pensions you're working so hard to pay.

I do agree with you about the unions, and for that matter anyone working at a company that's now gov't owned."