Inflated Pay

...Out of this group, only 11,180 got jobs in the bureaucr$cy...

...Chic New York and Paris fashion designers have found the Capital a lucrative market for their goods, with stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s (which just opened its second Washington branch) doing a brisk trade...

...Competition for civil service jobs has gotten so tough that a career counselor at George Washington University recently said, “A lot of students conclude the situation is too competitive and that they’re not interested in government work...

...What we really need is a relatively low-paid, relatively highturnover government, one that will preclude bureaucratic stultification, guarantee a constant flow of new ideas, and, most important, be filed with people who are there because they really believe in it-the old notion of public serivce...

...It happens to be true, as noted by the aforementioned Citizens’ Committ e’e , that “executives in all branches are taking early retirement in record numbers...

...Having such a government necessarily means that the people in it won’t always care deeply about what they’re doing, that a high-level lifestyle will be important to them, and that they’ll tend not to leave...

...As long as congressmen think they’re entitled to live like millionaires, the potential for corruption will always be there, no matter how many pay raises they’re given...

...What they ignored were the pay raises in 1968 and 1969, when congressmen got a raise of 40 per cent, federal judges 33 per cent, and supergrades about 29 per cent...

...That way, when the sense of mission wanes they can leave and be replaced by fresher souls...

...a 60-year-old supergrade needs only 20 years of service to get a full annuity, and a 62-year-old only five years...

...Darling herself claimed that “federal judges are leaving the bench and the black robe behind in record numbers...

...The pathos mounted as Darling revealed that this poor man, subsisting on $42,000 a year, had been backed to the wall-“His wife, he said, has been forced to go to work as a real estate agent to help pay for the college education of three of his children, he has sold a dearly beloved 24-foot inboard motor boat, and given up membership in a country club...

...What casual observation suggests, concrete facts confirm: Washingtonarea residents are the richest in the country...

...they develop a t here’s-nosense-in-tjing attitude...

...As Nicholas Von Hoffman noted in a recent column, only two other metropolitan areas even manage to scale the $20,000 mark...

...It’s a world full of arguments and assumptions that defy logic...

...The government would be run by people who didn’t spend much time worrying about their own affluence or security...

...The supergrades who recently had their salaries raised to $47,500 can retire at from $26,700 if they’re 55 and have 30 years service to $38,000 if they’re 65 and have ten more years service...

...Bamum, a Wall Street lawyer, was squeezed hard by the constraints of his $44,600 salary: he had to give up his hobby of collecting modern art and take out a loan to keep his children in their private schools...

...The result of the crowded scramble is that the government can afford to be highly selective about whom it hires: according to the Civil Service Commission, anyone who scores below 95 per cent on the test can pretty well abandon hope of being chosen...

...The point of Darling’s article was summed up by Barnum: “It’s just not possible to attract qualified people now...

...The argument was so disarming in its common-sense simplicity (“you get what you pay for”) that it united people who.would be expected to support a pay raise, like John Gardner, Vernon Jordan, and Douglas Dillon, with such usually tight-fisted conservatives as William F. Buckley, George Schultz, and George F. Will...

...He dismissed the $12,900 February increase for that position as disgracefully inadequate: “They ought to give a SO-percent increase...

...The surprise came when those out in the provinces were told that top government people can barely make ends meet...

...The pay itself is the first clue: before the raise, congressmen got $44,600 a year, federal judges $42,000, and supergrades in the bureaucracy up to $39,600...

...The few jobs that are available are concentrated in the lower grades, which include clerks and typists...

...The Wushingtonian’s monthly restaurant guide lists no fewer than 37 “expensive” and very expensive” places-restaurants where a couple can expect to spend at least $45 for dinner...

...Not only that, but these pensions -unlike government salariesare protected against inflation by automatic twice-a-year cost-ofliving raises...

...they didn’t take their jobs for the pay, and indeed would probably work for less...

...The reason, however, has little to do with low pay: much more important is the federal employees’ extravagant pension system, which far surpasses anything found in the private sector...

...Take the alleged mass exodus from the federal bench: in the last two years, out of almost 500 judges, only five have retired-an annual rate of about one half of one per cent...

...The trouble is, the present system isn’t producing these qualities as well as it could...

...Then the costofliving increases begin...

...The theory behind the pay raise is that we need highly competent, scrupulously honest career professionals at the top levels of the government and that these people need high pay so they’ll stay around and won’t be tempted into corruption, Now this certainly sounds good-who, after all, isn’t for competence and honesty...

...in the bureaucracies, there is little corruption but a great deal of incompetence, inefficiency, and behavior with no goal other than selfpreservation...

...Those figures compare with the average working American male’s yearly income of around $9,000...

...The February raise snuck up on us, amid a blizzard of favorable publicity, with no debate and no vote...

...Equally moving is the case of former Deputy Transportation Secretary John Barnum, who left that job when Jimmy Carter took office...

...A group calling itself the Citizens’ Committee for Restoring Public Trust in Government, brandishing an intimidating roster of prominent businessmen, educators, labor leaders, and former government officials, took out full-page ads in the nation’s major newspapers to warn ominously of a “Hidden Crisis in the Federal Government”to wit, the impossibility of finding qualified people to accept the shockingly low pay that goes with government service...

...The signs are numerous and visible everywhere...

...The best people in government at any time are there primarily because they believe in what they’re doing...

...If there’s any way to encourage the entry of more of these people into the government, and of keeping out the less idealistic, it’s by not paying them high salaries...

...Typical was an article by Lynn Darling of The washington Post, who depicted in bleak colors the plight of a federal judge, cataloging “the mounting bills, the thousands of dollars in loans he cannot repay, the friends he avoids because he cannot return their dinner invitations...

...None of this must have surprised most Americans, who tend to regard Washington as a lavish refuge for scoundrels and parasites...

...As for temptations toward corruption, they are a product not of absolute levels of income, but expectations...

...In the weeks preceding the February raise, the daily press was filled with grim tales of poverty in the government’s upper echelons...

...Part of the reasoning behind the argument was that the people affected had gotten only very small raises since 1969, despite a big increase in the cost of living...

...According to the National Association of Homebuilders, Washingtonians have bid prices on previously occupied homes higher than anywhere else in the United States...

...Despite the unanimity of opinion, it takes only a closer look to discover that the argument was transparent nonsense...

...Wrong Assumptions But it’s not just the facts of the pay-raise crowd that are in error...

...These ills arise in part from a well-paid career government...

...Metropolitan Washington boasts six Mercedes dealerships (Chicago has only five) and ranks sixth in the country in sales volume, ahead of cities like San Diego, Dallas, and Atlanta...

...Stephen J. Chapman is a Washington writer...

...For instance, a newcomer to the Washington area is struck by its obvious prosperity: from all indications the city and suburbs are awash in affluence...

...In a low-paid government, no one would expect to stay long and no one would consider a life of luxury part of the deal...

...Not only does the supposed disease look awfully benign, but its symptoms are almost nonexistent...

...There was almost no one left to disagree...

...The Civil Service Commission reported in December that the number of applicants for jobs outnumbered available positions by 30 to 1. In 1975, according to the Commission, 222,000 people took the Professional and Administrative Career Examination, of whom 112,000 passed...

...October’s is likely to do the same...

...Arguing that congressmen are underpaid requires some spectacular deductive juggling, since by the Quadrennial Commission’s own admission the average member gets a raise of $700 per year upon entering public service...

...But while there’s a brief between-raises breathing space, it’s worth looking at the world in which the raises are fashioned...

...But in Washington, for the most part, the reaction was one of unqualified sympathy...

...To those outside Washington, and no doubt to quite a few Washingtonians, the spectacle must have bordered on the comic: well-tailored men and women driving their late-model sedans from luxury homes and country estates to elegant French restaurants and Georgetown cocktail parties to cry on each others’ shoulders about their low standard of living...

...The “flood” of high-level bureaucrats leaving the government is likewise barely a trickle, with resignations among supergrades running between six tenths of one per cent and 1.4 per cent in the last five years, compared to a rate of seven to eight per cent for the civil service as a whole...

...top-level officials ought to be leaving the government in droves, although they aren’t...

...A government executive with 30 years of service can retire at age 55 with a full annuity...

...The Quadrennial Commission on Executive, Legislative, and Judicial Salaries, set up by Congress to make recommendations on federal pay, declared baldly, “The rate of good people leaving the government in the upper grades has become a flood...

...If government service were a financial sacrifice (without requiring vows of poverty, of course), then it would attract idealists who, as their idealism flagged, would leave and be replaced by new blood...

...Neither is there any problem fdling the few vacancies that occur in bureaucracy...

...In Congress, a 150-percent increase in pay over the last 13 years hasn’t seemed to have had an appreciable effect on the incorruptibility of the members...

...Inflated Pay by Stephen J. Chapman As if February’s substantial pay raises for top-level government officials weren’t enough-as, in the officials’ eyes, they apparently weren’t -a good many civil servants are getting another good-sized raise in October, supposedly to bring them up to the levels of pay for “comparable” jobs in the private sector...

...With an average annual household income of $23,602, the Capital makes even fairly affluent cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Houston-none of which has an average household income of as much as $17,000-look like poor relations...

...Most members of Congress who leave public service, as always, do so involuntarily...

...in prices for new homes it ranks fourth...

...their assumptions about what our government should be are all wrong too...

...The official catechism on federal pay is, then, doubly wrong: government ought to pay less than private industry, although it pays more...