Pay and Benefits: Double Trouble

Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute is making quite a cottage industry these days out of flogging data on federal vs. private sector compensation. He started in the spring by noting that if you factor both pay and benefits into the equation, average federal compensation is a lot better than that of the private sector as a whole. Then he got more recent data and came up with the great news hook that federal pay and benefits are now twice as lucrative as the private-sector average. That story sold far and wide.

Now, this weekend, Edwards turned up with an op-ed of his own on the subject in the Washington Post

So far, in challenging the Edwards thesis, federal employees and their supporters have focused on two things:

• The argument that matching the mostly white-collar federal workforce against the entire private economy amounts to an apples-to-oranges comparison.
• An attack on the underlying Edwards contention that the American government shouldn't bother trying to recruit and retain the best and brightest with an attractive compensation package.

But defenders of the civil service can't avail themselves of an argument being pushed by some left-of-center bloggers: that the data show not that federal compensation is excessive, but that private sector pay and (especially) benefits are weak. Even if that's true, it doesn't help the average fed.