Tom Emmer continues to make misleading claims about his budget. One of those misleading claims is that he would increase funding for education. As I’ve illustrated countless times by now, he makes that claim by selective ignoring portions of the budget.

The truth is, Emmer would freeze education. That’s a $525 million cut from what existing law says we should spend next biennium, and that’s at a time when school enrollment is expected to increase by around 14,000 students [PDF, see p. 50]. That means that Emmer will be making a big cut in real per-capita funding for education — twice as large as we saw under Pawlenty.

If you ask me, that doesn’t look like holding schools “harmless.” Once again, Tom Emmer just continues to take Tim Pawlenty’s policies to the extreme.

Republicans have criticized government for years, but it’s only recently that they have started feeling comfortable insulting public workers. A recent meme that has been popular among conservatives is that public workers are overpaid. They claim that public workers make tens of thousands of dollars more than comparable private workers. That is not only false, but easily disproved.

And it’s not just conservative bloggers making the claim. Tom Emmer has made the claim in recent debates, and given that Emmer never strays far from his talking points, he’s likely to repeat it. Because I don’t want Emmer getting away with it, I dug into the data* to set him straight.

What conservatives like Emmer are ignoring is education. When we control for education, it’s clear that private workers are higher paid than similarly-educated workers. The difference is particularly striking for college graduates: Private workers make over $16,000 more than public workers in Minnesota.

So why does it appear that government workers make more than private workers? Here in Minnesota, nearly twice as many government workers as private workers have college degrees. When you think about it, that’s not too surprising. Government simply doesn’t employ many people as cashiers, machine operators, and so on.

Studies that show that public workers make significantly more than private workers rely on misleading averages to make their points. Comparing the average for all private workers and the average for all public workers is misleading, because public workers are a significantly higher-educated workforce. 

*Data used in this study come from the 2006-2008 American Community Survey 3-year Public Use Microdata Sample. The numbers I used in my analysis are specific to Minnesota, although I believe I would find the same results nationwide.