Steve Lynch: “I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to address a couple of issues the gentleman has…”

“I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to address a couple of issues the gentleman has raised and say that I have enormous respect for the previous speaker as well. Oftentimes, these studies look at the average employee in the Federal Government versus the average employee in the private sector. In recent decades, the Federal Government has privatized a lot of our common labor rather than employing them directly. We have become a much more specialized and much more professionalized workforce, between the doctors and nurses we hire at the VA; the scientists that we have at the National Institutes of Health and the EPA; the lawyers we have at the Department of Justice; financial analysts that we have at the CFTC and FDIC, as well as the SEC and other banking industries. Those are more professionalized employees. {time} 1500 So naturally, if you look at a retail clerk, compare their salary to a scientist, there will be a drastic disparity between what an attorney is making or a financial analyst is making versus a secretary in the private sector. So that's a very crude way of comparison. One way of comparison is required in the Federal Pay Comparability Act. That's a statute that we passed here in Congress. It requires that we compare the levels of Federal doctors versus private sector doctors; federally employed scientists versus private sector scientists; finance analysts at the SEC versus those at Goldman Sachs. So we compared job to job.…”