Highly trained federal work force has no comparison Re: “Obama guts military but gives raises to bureaucrats,” Editorial, Jan. 9
I see The Washington Examiner is back trotting out the myth that federal employees earn twice as much money as those in the private sector. I always enjoy this comparison, which makes the editorial staff of The Examiner look like certified kooks, as well as your solution to freeze federal employee pay until private-sector pay catches up.
You completely ignore the fact that the statistical comparison is severely flawed because the federal work force does not generally include all of the same low-wage occupations that are included in the average wage calculation of the general population. For example, the federal government does not employ burger flippers and floor sweepers. It contracts with the private sector for work that is not inherently governmental, such as janitorial services, food services and building security services.
The only way private-sector salaries could possibly catch up to the salaries of the professionals employed by the federal government would be if the two work forces actually mirrored each other. Would The Examiner support adding half a million low-wage workers to the government payroll in order to even out the salary comparison playing field?
I did not think so.
Bill Spruce
Alexandria
Limited GOP primary ballot is problematic
Re: “Virginia’s ballot access laws are tough, fair,” Local Editorial, Jan. 5
You miss the point about presidential candidate access in Virginia, where only two Republican candidates have gained access to the ballot.
Have you forgotten about the 1781 Battle of Yorktown, the last — and perhaps the most important — major battle of the Revolutionary War? There Americans finalized their right to pick their own leaders, rather than having their leaders chosen for them.
There is something wrong with the process when only two Republicans win the right to have their names listed on a presidential ballot. The voters in Virginia deserve a more complete choice. This outcome gives the impression that the process, for whatever reason, is controlling the right of the voters to choose, rather than allowing the voters to control the choice of their leaders.
We wouldn’t do things that way in Maryland, the Free State.
Robin Ficker
Boyds, Md.
All communist regimes have their own version of the Gulag
Re: “Welcome to the Gulag, and give up all hope,” Dec. 11
I’ve only now I read Stella Morabito’s excellent account on the Soviet labor/death camps.
I witnessed the Gulag. All East European countries had their own camps to eliminate perceived political enemies, suppress intellectual dissent, and use the slave labor for major construction projects, such as the Moscow metro system.
Gulag is intimately linked to any communist (read “progressive”) regime in power. It still exists in Russia, North Korea, Cuba and China to various degrees. In the 1960s and ’70s, the Students for a Democratic Society were planning to open their own death camps for anybody reluctant to accept their “people’s power” after a revolutionary takeover in the U.S.
The Soviet Gulag was a protracted holocaust, taking out 50 percent of the Cambodian population after 1975. It is remembered and studied in schools and universities, but with mass ignorance and under proper conditions, history always repeats itself.
Michael Gloukhov
Fairfax
