Of course they aren’t competitive. Patent examiners are not lawyers, and can’t and don’t expect to make what lawyers make. The comparison that would have any relevance would be patent examiner salaries vs. patent agent salaries. They are roughly competitive when you factor in the bankers’ hours people work at the PTO.
More specifically, examiners can through tenure alone advance to GS-12 which for D.C. metro gets you a minimum of $74,872, plus there’s IIRC about a $20k sign-on bonus (pro-rated over a few years). Is it your belief that examiners could substantially better that, for the same amount of work, in the private sector? Rather, I’d guess they could bump it up by $10k or a little bit more but would have to work a good bit more.
Your statement that the lack of quality of the PTO is being motivated by “civil servant bashing” is just ridiculous. Seriously. You think Congress is, what, just on the verge of paying examiners (most of whom have a bachelors, at best masters, a third of whom speak anything resembling English) $150k but then they hear that Huerta or some other jackass on the interwebs called them out on having $170k DoT retards, so they don’t? It sure didn’t stop them with the first batch of grossly-overpaid civil servant retards.
Huerta, if you hate the U.S. government so much, what I don’t understand is why you don’t just move to another country with a government system more to your liking. I mean how likely is it that things are going to suddenly change here to bring our government in line with how you think it should operate? Do you see that happening in a year? 2 years? Ten years? I mean, it seems like the options in front of you are to stay here and be pissed all the time, or just find a new home that you like better. Unless you just like to be pissed off all the time.
All I’ve advocated for here is not increasing the present top marginal rate. That’s it. I don’t love the current size of government. But I’d probably continue to grin and bear it if taxes don’t go up any further. Not go down. Not go away. Do I realistically think any of those DoT retards are going to stop making $170k? No. I just don’t want further extension of civil servant decadence (during a horrible recession, they seem to be the only ones thriving).
When you have to use words I haven’t used (“hate”), maybe you’re arguing against arguments I haven’t made.
Its not that it is not feasible, it is not equitable or in keeping with the traditions of a democratic society.
Yes, and it is provided BY the government.
Yes it can be taken away but it is a protected right. That’s why we don’t have literacy exams anymore.
I wasn’t talking about the 4th amendment (I subconsiously borrowed language from it) but I have property rights taht teh government will protect.
Are we back to the “taxes are theft” mantra again? Public education and soon health care are rights here in America. Its not my probl;em that you have restricted the your definition of rights to the universe of rights taht you approve of.
You do realize that there are references to slavery in the Constitution (slaves count as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of determining congressional representation), don’t you?
There is opinion and there is fact. Most of what you say is opinion. If the Democrats lose in November it is a referendum on the economy. That is FACT.
There is NOTHING that has been done during the past two years that were not exsplicitly laid out during the 2008 campaign season. Health care was a prominent part of the presidential debates, the stimulus plan and TARP pre-existed an Obama presidency and the Obama stimulus was also well advertised BEFORE he got elected. If anything people got LESS than they were promised.
People are pissed because of the economy. You really think that if the economy was buzzing right along, we would be talking about a possible turnover in the House, you think there is ANY chance we would be talking about a turnover in the senate without a crappy economy?
To make more than this you have to be an executive and then you get paid on the SES scale which tops out at $179,000 (you can get more in the form of awards and bonuses).
Generally speaking the higher up you go in the GS scale the lower the civil servant’s pay is relative to their counterpart in the private sector.
How many $170K folks do you think there are at the DoT?
Here is a breakdown of some of the higher paying jobs in government:
How much do you think the federal (non-military) payroll comes to?
If we eliminated every paying job and replaced them entirely with volunteers, how much do you think we save? The entire non military federal payroll is less than $100 billion (closer to about 75 billion).
I guess I’m trying to say that your have some misconeptions about where your tax dollars are going.
Why does the "anti-tax’ crowd always get thsi wrong? First it was “get rid of earmarks so we can balance the budget” now it “oh those federal employees are swucking up all opur tax dollars”
There are valid criticisms of earmarks and giving money to civil servants for working but neither is driving up our taxes.
My taxes are about to go up again if Congress doesn’t renew the Bush tax provisions. They will be higher at the margins next year than this year. Can’t put it plainer than that.
I didn’t ‘have to’ use the word hate specifically, but I dunno ‘civil servant retards’ seems like a pretty hateful remark to me. The disdain you seem to feel for the government is pretty much dripping from your posts. Besides, where in the rules of debate does it say that I am only allowed to use words that you have already used in your responses to this thread. If that is in fact the rule, can you assemble me a list of all of the words that you have already used in this thread so that I can craft my next post from that vocabulary list? That would help us avoid these non answers due to technicality in the future I suppose.
Would you agree the tax cuts should not be renewed if they do not also abolish DOE, DOL and HUD as you suggested? Or is keeping your current tax rate more important than not increasing the deficit?
Why are you now trying to argue a completely different point (hint: check who controlled the Congress)? You haven’t even acknowledged how utterly wrong you were about your previous half-baked idea. You are obviously just throwing stuff out there in case something sticks.
So let’s see if I get your point. Because conservative states are now somewhat less fucked up than they used to be, somehow that is evidence that conservatism works? Is my deadbeat brother in-law doing better than me because he managed to work 9 months out of the last 12 rather than 6 months like he did the previous year? The red states lag blue states in almost every measurable standard: wealth, education level, divorce rate, health, and lifespan. And that is despite the fact that blue states are subsidizing red states by paying more in taxes than they receive back in spending. Meanwhile, at the national level, there are decades worth of evidence that the country does worse when Republicans are in charge.
As a governing philosophy conservatism is a loser. We cut taxes and revenue went down, just like anyone with two grey lobes to rub together expected. But now having driven us into the ditch conservatives want to grab the wheel again and put us right back in the ditch.
I remember when conservatives were realists and liberals were idealists. Now conservatives ignore fact and reason to push their idiotic ideology.
In conservative-land where you just make shit up. Didn’t you know that Obama raised taxes on the middle class? Or that he was born in Kenya, and is a Muslim, who hates white people, and wants to create death panels to decide who lives and dies?
No, it is the evidence that the theory that being conservative causes you to have lower income because the states governed by the Republicans are poorer was wrong. I never said that the opposite theory is true. If you bothered to read my post, you’d see that I wrote that the urban/rural split is a much better explanation for these differences and that I expressed doubts that there is a cause-and-effect relationship and that it means anything as it relates to the policy anyway. And even if we ignored all these concerns, the data still shows that Republican governance in these states helped them more than Democratic governance in other states.
So he became a teacher?
We just went through the same thing with the income and you still don’t seem to get it. Present correlation means nothing when there are much better explanations, such as the urban/rural split, and you need to look at the changes through the years (and even that might not be enough).
I should know by now that you wouldn’t see it, but I specifically answered this already with the quote from the Tax Foundation:
And this evidence is where? Will you be ignoring the Congress this time? Note that I’m asking just because you are again making an unsupported assertion, not because I think that the economic policies of the Republicans are much better than these of the Democrats.
I must have missed your evidence that maximizing government revenue is what is best for the economy.
I am not the person you were replying to, but while the tax increase is not yet in effect, the law to raise taxes was passed and became the law of the nation in 2010. Not taking this tax increase that will especially affect higher-income people into account would of course be wrong.
