More On Bad Studies of Wisconsin Wages and Benefits

On Tuesday I posted  Another Incomplete Wisconsin Tax Analysis noting that an editorial attacking the wage rates and benefits of public employees was inaccurate because it was premised on a badly flawed publication from the Wisconsin Taxpayer's Alliance (WTA).*

A fine job is done by Bruce Murphy, Murphy's Law, Milwaukee Magazine, in further dissecting these distortions:

Attempts to compare total compensation of public and private sector employees always run into the problem of what is a comparable job. Few studies have ever attempted to do this. A 2001 study by the state of Washington looked at a range of 100 state jobs and found public sector workers earned 16 percent less in salaries and benefits, on average, than comparable workers in the private sector. A 1997 Congressional Budget Office study found that federal employees earned higher benefits but lower salaries and lower total compensation than their private sector counterparts.

So long as WTA furthers its political agenda by padding studies like this, we will continue to have a logjam in the state legislature and the budget will not be adopted.  Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce (WMC), the Republican legislators in the Assembly, and conservative editors pick up on this inaccurate information and perpetuate the myth that Wisconsin government is filled with overpaid and inept public employees.

If we are going to have an intelligent discussion of pubic policy in this state we must drop the highly partisan and ideological right wing studies that come from so-called "non-partisan" think tanks and move on to rational discussion.

It strikes me with profound disappointment that business leaders in manufacturing and commerce who base their political analysis on this nonsense would never make business decisions based on such flawed information.

*First of all, those numbers are meaningless. You would not compare two automobiles that were priced at $34,000 and call them comparable unless you knew more about them. We need to know the positions and the responsibilities. Or perhaps we should also look at top managers. Public sector managers who are paid $80,000-100,000 would be making anywhere from $100,000-250,000 in the private sector.