The latest jobs numbers look pretty awful for most Americans – but they don’t look so bad for certain classes of Americans. Americans aged 25 and up with a college degree or more have a 3.8 percent unemployment rate. But the group of Americans doing the best is civilian government workers of all levels of educational attainment.
The government worker unemployment rate clocks in at just 3.6 percent, the best of any class of worker. Federal, state, and local workers are doing phenomenally well in retaining and growing their employment, with government payrolls jumping 618,000 since July 2012.
Americans pay far more for government workers than they do for their private sector dopplegangers. According to the Congressional Budget Office last year, federal employees make 16 percent more in total compensation, including salary and benefits. When it comes to educational level, the less educated you are, the better off you are working for the government – high school graduates make 36 percent more in the public sector, while college grads make 15 percent more in the public sector. People with professional degrees or doctorates are 18 percent better off in the private sector. No wonder the government is happy to keep people undereducated. It feeds their growing workforce.
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).
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