Instead of even considering a federal pay cut, politicians who live in the real world, watch TV and read newspapers might want to think about giving hazard pay to lots of government workers. Many have dangerous jobs. Even more are at risk just because they work in a federal office.

Although it is very, very, very unlikely to happen, a South Carolina congressman has proposed an 8.7 percent cut for people making $100,000 or more. That would include members of Congress, as well as executive branch employees in places like the IRS, Pentagon, State Department and most other agencies. Those agencies, by the way, can be hazardous to your health.

IRS employees and workers at the Social Security Administration get threatened or sworn at every day. So do inspectors from the Agriculture and Labor departments. Now-a-days when you think of the National Institutes of Health you also think of Ebola. And there is always a risk if your duty station is the Pentagon. Or any military base. Or post office.

Several years ago a crazed taxpayer rented an airplane and crashed it into an IRS office in Austin. He died, along with a career IRS employee whose business, ironically, was in making sure people didn’t overpay or get beat up by the IRS.

An American ambassdor was slashed and stabbed a few weeks back in South Korea by a man who blames us, as in the U.S., for preventing the two Koreas from becoming one. He had one guard, a local employee, who was unarmed. A U.S. ambassador and three coworkers were killed in a terrorist attack in Bengazi. Workers at the Navy Yard in D.C., were shot and killed by a contractor gone bad. And the beat goes on…

Riding a NASA rocket can be tricky. Carrying a badge for the FBI, DEA, ATF or the U.S. Park police is dangerous every day. Border patrolmen often get shot at. Forest Service employees and Interior personnel face angry men (sometimes women), beasts, and climate and terrain every working day.

Members of Congress have highly trained, professional cops to guard them. And in some cases take a bullet for them. But the well-protected pols cut agency budgets so that feds in many spots are “protected” by minimum-wage (minimum-training) rent-a-cops. Or have no protection at all where they work—sometimes in strip malls or shoping centers.

One reader, Linda, commented: “The only over paid and under-performing feds that I know about sit in Congress where they work fewer days per week and fewer months per year than the regular federal workforce, take foreign vacations, get free parking at National Airport, free postage, a fancy gym, and yet, produce nothing.”

Or can decorate their well-guarded offices to look like Downton Abbey.

Ever think you are in the wrong business?

Nearly Useless Factoid by Julia Ziegler

The state of Wyoming only has two escalators. (Source: The Atlantic)

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