(Bumped, for glory. - promoted by Bob Neer)
Scott Brown doing his best impression of an intellectual dining room table on 31 January 2010 on Barbara Walters:
Federal employees are making twice as much as their private counterparts.
 Reality-based Fail, according to non-partisan fact-checker Politifact. Brown was apparently relying on a Cato "Institute" "study" that asserted that "the average wage for 1.9 million federal civilian workers was $79,197, compared to $50,028 for the nation's 108 million private-sector workers." He cited the same study on 4 January. (Cato, conveniently, left out all of the federal government's military employees, because they don't support its argument, but we can use its made up numbers for purposes of discussion at least).
First problem: $79,197 is not twice as much as $50,028. Get used to more of this Republican Math as Charlie Baker starts to power up his own effort to conga line along after Brown.
Second problem: the 1.9 million federal jobs are not the same as the 108 million private sector jobs. Politifact:
Finally, we found it's a mixed bag when comparing individual private and public sector occupations -- the "private counterparts" he spoke of. Some public jobs pay more, some pay less. And the public ones that pay more are not consistently double as he claimed.
So he's wrong to say it's double and wrong to suggest that it's always the case when comparing specific jobs. We rate his claim False.
Scott Brown thinks that two times 50 equals 80. No wonder he also thinks that voting 96 percent of the time with the Republicans means he's independent, limiting women's freedom to choose means he is pro-choice, torture is a good way to get reliable information, and being elected by about the same number of Massachusetts voters who cast ballots for John McCain in 2008 constitutes an enormous popular mandate. |
