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On the ever popular subject of whether public employees are coddled and overpaid, EPI steps in with a new bit of research from Jeffrey Keefe of Rutgers today. I’ll spare you the suspense and get right to the results:

This is pretty much what you’d expect. Public employees get a bigger share of their compensation in benefits than private sector employees (34% of total comp vs. 26-33%), and because of this the lower rungs of the public sector ladder get paid a bit more than their private sector counterparts. Anyone with a college education or more, however, is paid far less, and this brings the overall average for the public sector a bit below the private sector.

In a separate calculation that controls for full-time status, education level, years of experience, age, gender, race, employer organizational size, industry, and hours worked, the report concludes that public employees are compensated 2-7% less than equivalent private sector employees.

Take from this what you will. Obviously it’s hard to know for sure if all the controls are properly accounted for, and you can decide for yourself if it’s fair for high school and community college grads to make more working on the taxpayer dime than they would in private industry. Overall, though, this is yet another study that tells us the numbers are pretty close no matter how you slice them. It’s always easy to find a few horror stories (usually cops or firefighters who works fantastic amounts of overtime), but in the aggregate it doesn’t look like there’s much evidence that government jobs are overpaid compared to private jobs.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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