Feeding the Feds--Look up salaries
Here's an interesting thing to try...Go here and you can look up the salary of any federal employee. Try it, you can look up your friends and neighbors who work for the government and find out that they don't make as much as you thought that they did.
It's interesting to note who isn't listed, though. Why, Congress and the White House. Of course, every time that there's some new kind of privacy issue, the lawmakers are strangely exempt. For instance, the notorious US don't-call-registry also exempted political fund raising.
A friend of mine sent me this link but I won't mention his name because otherwise you could look him up (hint: his first name is Rich.)
I don't know if disclosing federal salaries is actually a privacy violation but I probably wouldn't like it if it were me. As more and more information becomes available on the web, couldn't we make some kind of attempt to make it universal, so everyone's salary become visible? I'm sure that this would be provocative, but it might be interesting to make IRS returns a matter of public record.
Posted on July 12, 2007
