Sorry, but when federal civilian employees pay since 2000 has increased at an annual rate of 3 percent per year ABOVE the inflation rate, and AD pay is just barely keeping pace with inflation (or losing), then something is very, very wrong...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/us/politics/30freeze.html
The Times cannot be taken as an unbiased source on anything since they will report an assemblage of partial truths to bolster whatever the official Democrat position might be. This is an area where the opportunity to lie with carefully-constructed statistics is practically unbounded.
Your comparison to AD pay is a little odd since annual Federal civilian pay increases are pegged to military pay increases
and always less. Collectively, looking at total payroll, there are huge differences:
1. A big part of military compensation is non-taxable BAH, and a lot of these comparisons want to cost out every dime of civilian employee benefits while just looking at military base pay, omitting a side-by-side comparison with the actual full cost of the military benefit basket, or even at their very best they compare a first-term E3 driving a PLS on a dirt road in a maneuver area to a career employee with a CDL driving on US highways.
2. The bulk of the military payroll is what in work force stat terms would be blue collar work, and it's actually not even at the top of the food chain for danger as far as blue collar work goes. On the civil service side, the blue collar functions other than law enforcement have been relentlessly contracted out and every year that goes by there is pressure to flip over any that remain. What's left is more than ever a white collar organization, so comparing it to a super bank is more apt than comparing it to a super factory. If you had a super-bank with its headquarters in Arlington or DC, do you think 10% of its employees would be making over $150K?
3. If civilian pay has increased 3% a year since 2000, that has NOTHING to do with annual pay increases, which as best I recall have never been anything like that high over that whole period, that has to do with the total budget with lower-level jobs getting contracted out or dispensed with through automation, and people increasing in seniority in an aging work force...the structure of civil service pay is that it is decent to start with, but there is no potential for large increase, and instead it slowly but steadily increases over the years one stays in the system to make up for the lack of any take-off. Depending on the field, there may or may not be promotion as the career progresses, which also increases salary at a measured pace. The lack of any fast upside potential, as well as record of qualifications among competitors for openings, both work from opposite directions to ensure that the median workforce age and seniority creep steadily up. The military on the other hand starts with modest pay but a killer benefits package, and counts on 50% of the Soldiers who successfully complete training and join units to leave active service within four to six years; it has its own seniority increases for time in service, of course, but it also has an up-or-out system of promotion, so that if you stay in it for a career, pay necessarily increases through promotion as well as seniority.
It's all a bunch of apples and oranges horseshit, and just the GOP version of the class warfare we're always mocking the Democrats for. And an awful lot of the hatin' on the Federal employees is coming from the same people who demand their Government services be rendered immediately and perfectly when they want them...like their own tax refund, or their own VA decision or treatment, or their own Social Security payment...people with their own special entitlement mentality about the Government, i.e. that it should promptly and fully render anything it can do for them, but they shouldn't have to pay what it costs for it to have that capability. Yep...people like the NYT editiorial staff.
