CHANGE...YOU CAN BELIEVE IN?...NO IT'S BUSINESS AS USUAL...

From: ATLASHRUGS.COM

Enslaving the American People, Feds Get Rich, Rich, Rich

How do people reconcile this in their minds? How do Americans reconcile the fact that federal employees earn an average of $30,000 more than the private sector employee? Or that close to 350,000 federal employees earn more than $100,000?

They are bankrupting this nation while stuffing their faces on the backs of Americans. This is the poisonous fruit of the left's utopian dream of big government.

Ayn Rand saw it all:

Today, when a concerted effort is made to obliterate this point, it cannot be repeated too often that the Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals—that it does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government—that it is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizen’s protection against the government.

America’s abundance was created not by public sacrifices to “the common good,” but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes. They did not starve the people to pay for America’s industrialization. They gave the people better jobs, higher wages and cheaper goods with every new machine they invented, with every scientific discovery or technological advance—and thus the whole country was moving forward and profiting, not suffering, every step of the way.

The goal of the “liberals”—as it emerges from the record of the past decades—was to smuggle this country into welfare statism by means of single, concrete, specific measures, enlarging the power of the government a step at a time, never permitting these steps to be summed up into principles, never permitting their direction to be identified or the basic issue to be named. Thus, statism was to come, not by vote or by violence, but by slow rot—by a long process of evasion and epistemological corruption, leading to a fait accompli. (The goal of the “conservative” was only to retard that process.)

USATODAY has an interesting analysis that shows that federal salaries have actually increased through this recession while 7.3 million private sector jobs have gone POOOF! Now the average federal worker's salary is $71,206, compared with $40,331 in the private sector.

So I ask, did the percentage of $100,000 salaries in your industry increase in the last two years? Did most workers in your industry get an automatic pay bump based on longevity or the fact that your boss got a raise?

For feds, more get 6-figure salaries

The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months — and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.

The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available.

When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.

The trend to six-figure salaries is occurring throughout the federal government, in agencies big and small, high-tech and low-tech. The primary cause: substantial pay raises and new salary rules.

"There's no way to justify this to the American people. It's ridiculous," says Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, a first-term lawmaker who is on the House's federal workforce subcommittee.