Dennis Cauchon of USAToday Should Be Fired

As a journalist, he is either incompetent or, worse, he is a biased hack that wants to mislead us. Either way, he has no use holding a reporting position at a major US newspaper.

The dual articles that have caught my attention (and caused my ire) are this one and this one. You probably heard both on the national nightly news: In the first, he outlines that the number of workers being paid more than $150,000 has risen tenfold in the last five years, and doubled in the last two. In the second, he purports to tell us that federal workers earn double their private counterparts.

I don't have the time to dissect each and every claim he makes (although they appear to be universally incorrect!), but I'll start, and you can understand the underlying problems in his 'reporting'.

First: Mr Cauchon doesn't cite his sources. Although he does indicate that the information comes from the Office of Personnel Management, they have hundreds of documents available to the public. I was able to find a couple that surely he looked at, but not all. That's shoddy on his part (or deliberately obfuscating).

Second: The claim that the number of federal workers making more than $150,000 has ballooned.

If Mr Cauchon had the least bit of economic knowledge, he would realize two things that would have to be investigated underlying this. First, he would have to account for inflation: Using a nominal 3% figure for the last five years, we would find that any worker who was making $130,000 or more in 2005 we would expect to be making $150,000 or more today. I was able to find a figure for 2004: There were over 34,000 federal civilian employees making more than $130,000 at that time. So we would expect that if their salaries had just kept pace with inflation, there would be at least that many making more than $150,000 today. Now, Mr Cauchon does show that there are more than 82,000 making above $150,000 today. So, the news is not that we have 75000 more people earning at that rate, but that we have 40,000 more earning. Second, since Mr Cauchon is paid to do his reporting (as opposed to you and I who have to take time away from our personal lives to find this information), he should have dug a little deeper into where the extra high paying employees existed: Is there legislation passed during the last five years that created these jobs? Are they located in one area of the country? What is the underlying cause?

That would be useful information with which to inform our opinion.

Third: The Claim (from the second article) that Federal Pay is double its private counterparts.

That appears to be completely bogus and misleading. From the reports that I did find at the OPM site, they conduct extensive studies every year in an attempt to pay federal employees the same amount for the same job as their private counterparts: They compare the required education and experience to arrive at comparable salaries. They are open about their methodology, and in fact conclude that, on average, federal employees are paid slightly less than their private counterparts. In the second article, Mr Cauchon admits that they study he or his counterparts are using disregards eduction and experience - i.e., it is useless for doing any sort of pay comparison! What a load of crap!

Finally, the point that the numbers growing exponentially during the last two years: We would expect that also. If you think about the pay of all individuals as a pyramid, with ever larger numbers at lower pay, and the pyramid rising out of the water (the $150,000 pay line), you would expect that each year a greater number of individuals would rise above that line - reproducing the numbers in his article tells us nothing useful about the movement in pay: The same effect is occurring in the private sector...

The real reasons Mr Cauchon has gained my ire are these: First, we count on our reporters to inform our opinion, so that we can make considered decisions about various subjects. When a report does his or her job so shoddily that they provide mis-information at best, we are not capable of doing our jobs as citizens in a democracy. Since the implicit undertone of his dual articles is that Federal workers are being paid above their skill, education, and experience levels, I want to turn that back on Mr Cauchon and have shown how he is obviously being paid way above his level of expertise as well.

Second, as the aforementioned citizen in a democracy, I take affront to these wholesale attacks on our government. We form our government and use it to achieve collectively those objectives we cannot achieve alone. Sure we have the military to protect us from outside attackers, but we have also found the need to protect ourselves from the rapacious, wealthy elite, who would, in many cases, poison us with our food, their chemicals, drugs; take advantage of us through obfuscated contracts, unsafe working conditions, and more. We've used our government time and again to stipulate our interactions, and provide laws to regulate their behavior, and qualified individuals to oversee the enforcement of those regulations.

Like a cancer in an otherwise healthy body, there are pockets of graft, corruption, perhaps nepotism that form within our otherwise healthy and useful government. I want, nay, depend upon intrepid, intelligent, and well informed reporters who will ferret out those pockets and expose them, so that we can act to control, reform, or remove them.

Unfortunately, Mr Cauchon displays none of those qualities in his writings of Nov 10. Instead, he opens the door for wholesale assaults on our entire federal employee system (See, for example, Mr Beohner's comments on freezing all government pay). That would surely undermine our collective goals as a citizenry, since it is less than 4% of all federal civilian employees who make a great deal; most federal employees are paid down in a scale commensurate with their private counterparts, a scant 1.4% raise this year likely falls behind inflation, and they become poorer, too.

Mr. Cauchon has not informed us, has not uncovered corruption or a frightening trend, has not even told the truth in any meaningful way. Although, I am probably wrong in calling for his firing: He could be sent back to the copyroom, etc for more training. His editor is probably the individual who should be fired for dereliction of duties in allowing Mr Cauchon's piece to even appear!