If you look through that paper, you'll also see that there's no clear agreement as to what the measure of over/underpayment is. It finally bases the conclusion that federal workers are overpaid because "Just 1 in 5,000 federal nondefense workers is fired for poor performance each year."

That's the metric for wages? At a minimum, they could at least try to show those non-fired workers underperform their private equivalents, but they don't even try.

Further, it argues that top federal positions shouldn't be paying comparable wages because "it draws talent away from high-valued activities in the private sector", which is an interesting argument: we essentially should pay less for government to ensure we get worse government.

All in all, an odd paper. Oh, I see it's written by the Cato Institute:
Quote:

The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization — a think tank — dedicated to the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets and peace. Its scholars and analysts conduct independent, nonpartisan research on a wide range of policy issues.

The bottom line is that even this paper admits it's not an apples to apples comparison.

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?