国际英语新闻：Higher pay for gov't workers than private employees questioned in U.S.

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 12 (Xinhua) -- A report by "USA Today" that government employees are paid more than private sector workers has sparked a debate in the United States over federal government spending when the whole country is struggling to get over the recession.

Citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Wednesday report said that federal civil servants earned an average pay and benefits of 123,049 U.S. dollars in 2009 while private workers made only 61,051 dollars in total compensation, almost less than half of the former.

Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation gap between federal and private workers has doubled in the past decade, the report said.

U.S. citizens have responded differently to the issue, with some criticizing the government for overspending and others attributing the civil servants' high pay to their advanced education. But some people expect that the rewards of public and private sector workers will eventually come into accord.

"Our supposedly free-market economy is addicted to government spending and federal subsidies. And we're now in the early stage of an ugly detoxification," Rick Newman, a blogger on www.seekingalpha.com, wrote.

The government is still indulging in spending although "unemployment in the U.S. is way too high, hiring is pitiful, the housing bust refuses to end, consumers don't want to spend, and instead of gathering steam, the economy seems to be sputtering toward another breakdown," he said.

The reason is because government employees are largely funded by taxpayers, he pointed out.

James Sherk from the Heritage Foundation found that federal employees get paid 22 percent more per hour on average than private-sector workers. Adding to the lavish benefits that federal government workers receive, federal employees earn approximately 30 to 40 percent more in total compensation than comparable private-sector workers.

According to the Heritage Foundation, unlike the private sector, the federal government has actually been adding jobs since the start of the recession in December 2007, when private sectors were facing increasing unemployment.

Instead of forcing federal, state and local governments to make tough decisions regarding government workers' pay, benefits and pensions, President Barack Obama is bailing them out. Instead of cutting and simplifying taxes, the president wants to raise them and use the tax code to punish U.S. companies that compete overseas, Conn Carroll, also from the Heritage Foundation, wrote in the blog.

But Eric Schroeck, another blogger, holds a different view. A comparison between federal and private-sector pay is misleading because the employees hired by the federal government often have higher levels of education than their counterparts in the private sector, he wrote on www.mediamatters.org.

"When you factor in the education and experience of the federal workforce, there is no statistically significant difference in average pay levels," Schroeck wrote.

Overall, roughly half of the federal workforce has a college degree, compared to about a third in the private sector. Most of the difference (82 percent) in average pay between the federal government and the private sector is explained by these differences in education, Schroeck wrote.

Schroeck concluded that the bottom line is: When education and age are held constant, the entire difference in average pay between the federal and private sectors disappears.

In Rick Newman's opinion, local and state governments are starting to trim their own payrolls, much like private companies have done over the last two years.

Over time, the rewards of public-sector work will come back into alignment with those in the private sector, an adjustment that will have an impact on the quality and availability of government services across the United States, he pointed out.