Reasonable Salaries

The debate's been heating up in comments over at a story I wrote on Friday about whether $100,000 is a good threshhold number to use to talk about federal pay. Beyond that question though, I think it's important to understand that patterns in pay are the product of long-standing system and of long tenure, and that it probably doesn't make a lot of sense to radically change compensation policy in response to fluctuations in the economy.

While the economic situation is grave, and its impact on many American families is extremely serious, the recession also isn't going to last forever. I have neither a crystal ball nor a sophisticated economic model to hand, so I can't say how long it's going to last. But immediately slashing federal salaries is something that would take time to pass and to implement, and by the time it was implemented, it's entirely possible that the economy would have recovered. Reversing those cuts would then take additional time, during which the federal government would be disadvantaged in comparison to recovering private sector firms. Because a lag is inevitable, it's impossible to make public sector pay match the economy's rise and fall inevitably, and following behind those economic curves probably would do more harm to the government's ability to recruit and retain qualified employees than it would help reduce the deficit or impart a sense of fairness to laid-off Americans.

And really, federal pay is going to look a lot lower on the aggregate when an entire cohort of long-tenured, highly-paid federal employees retires, and is replaced by workers starting at much, much lower salaries. Those employees' salaries will rise over time, of course, but so do most people's, commensurate with experience. Higher federal salaries are a rising and falling curve rather than a permanent condition, and folks would do well not to get in a permanent panic about it.