What REALLY grinds your gears?

[Buffalo Bob]

Originally Posted by over the mountain

fed gov't employees.

i get to rep a good bit of them and I am always shocked at how over-paid they are for clocking 40 hour work weeks with pension and benefits.

then they come in and you meet them and they are fat, lazy and can not speak properly ..... but drive multiple high end vehicles while the rest of us bust hump 50-60 hours a week with no pension and have to contribute to health ins for half the pay.

i dont hate the individual federal employee (except when they complain), i hate the fed govt system for their employees.

You can't paint all government employees with the same brush, whether it be city, county, state or federal. Took me decades to figure it out, first the average citizen usually only interacts with the lowest government employees.
The jobs that require no or minimal special skills or education past high school or a Ged. Examples would be, federal procurement officers, ATF, FBI, Border Patrol, IRS agents, Postal workers on a federal level, DMV clerks, DOT workers, State Patrol on a state level, police, sheriffs, building inspectors, health inspectors, on a city and county level. The preceding group are usually paid 2-3 times what they would earn for their job skills and education in the private sector.

If you go to what I would call mid or upper mid level government jobs they start to even out pay wise with the private sector, jobs that require 4 year degrees plus experience, master's degrees and PHD's. These people make a little more or the same than private sector, usually with good benefits. Science and Technology researchers, college professors, university deans, medical doctors and psychologists working in county, state and federal facilities. The problem is most people never interact with these people so their opinion of government workers is formed by their experiences with the lower level employees, see above.

Top level, mostly way underpaid. You could equate senators, governors, and the President as CEO's of varied sized corporations. The average governor made $133K, Senator $174k and the president $400K. In 2011 a total of 485 CEO's made over $1 million according to Forbes.

For the record as a whole I think most lower level government employees
need either fired or big pay cuts. To me it is the same as giving welfare to an able bodied person if you are paying $30 an hour for a government job that needs equivalent skills and education to working the snack bar at the movie theater.