Reply to Were lots of DC-area professionals overpaid?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My husband has always contended that salaries never make any sense and increasingly I agree with him.

We have a friend who is a state-level administrator for bridges. So she oversees hundreds of employees and her division is responsible for the construction, maintenance, and replacement of every state-owned bridge. She makes 200k and is restricted by statute from making more.

We have another friend who trades utilities? Not totally clear on his exact job, but it's finance related to the trading of like power and utilities? He has a staff of 3-4 people and makes 7 figures.

Does this make sense? Not really. They work similar hours. The state administrator is actually more educated.

But salaries don't always make sense. They are usually dictated by how close you are to the levers of capitalism, and someone working in finance is right in the mix of those levers, and someone working in a government job overseeing infrastructure is viewed within our economy as just running a cost center.

It never makes sense.[/quote]

You could make the argument that most Fortune 500 CEO's are overpaid, but by the logic of some in this thread [b] if the company is willing to pay it, especially in an in-demand city, then they are, by definition, not overpaid. [/b]I'm sure that one will go over real well.[/quote]

Well, yes. That is economically true.

You may think those jobs are overvalued. That's fine, values are subjective. But the people paying get to decide what they're willing to pay for. 
And any [i]individual[/i] being paid the typical rate for a person of similar education and experience is by definition not overpaid, even if you personally think the market rate is not a good value. [/quote]

The issue here is that private market salaries are set in an environment where there are countless different employers offering salaries independently and in pursuit of their own self interest.

If a big chunk of the non-profit industry is all being funded by the US government, there isn’t actually a functioning free market.

It is also clear that USAID wasn’t doing proper due diligence if it was awarding grants to “non profits” that were making their leadership rich while supposedly administering charity.

How could anyone pay the salaries shown in the documents posted earlier while claiming they are doing some humanitarian mission?

There are only 100 people in the company… how can you need 7 people at an average annual compensation of over $400k/year to run a 100 person nonprofit with a small budget?

At a minimum there should be rules put in place that any nonprofit receiving a grant from the US government pay no more than is allowed by the government pay scale.

This nonprofit was paying its CEO two thirds of a million dollars a year to run a 100 person entity with a $70million budget… meanwhile actual USAID senior leadership weren’t making much more than a third of that to run vastly larger entities.

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