Q&A of the day – About the $128,000 federal employee payday
It’s the Q&A of the day. Each day I’ll feature a listener question that’s been submitted by one of these methods.
Email: brianmudd@iheartmedia.com
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Feel free to shoot away with your questions and I’ll do my best to keep up. Today’s question comes from Bobby.
I read your piece on the fed employees avg salary and it left me speechless.
I went online and couldn’t match your quoted figure of $128K. Is that because you included all fringe benefits (eg, health insurance etc?). If so, would a safe estimate w/o fringe be about 70% of the total, ie about $90K? Still very high!
Bottom Line: Yesterday in my story: How much federal employees earn and how much you pay them I shared the real cost to you annually to pay for federal government employees, $15,200 per household. It’s a staggeringly high real cost to all of us to pay for the federal employees that man the 430-federal agencies at an average total cost of $128,000 per employee. Now, that $128,000 figure is the total compensation cost to us – meaning that it includes salary and benefits. In the context of the conversation of the cost to us it doesn’t matter how much of that’s base salary (that averaged $89k as of 2016) vs benefits – it's hard costs that we have to pay for annually. This as the average private sector employee earns $49,000 per year while working an average of 12% more hours as well.
Also, as I pointed out yesterday – if the approximate 25% of the federal government that’s shutdown stayed shutdown for the entire year, we’d save $3,800 per household this year. I’ve still yet had someone say they’d rather not have an extra $3,800 in their own money to end the partial government shutdown to ensure we’d pay all of those employees that $3,800 instead.
Until Monday’s Q&A... Hit me up with your questions or topics.