It's been trending this way for a long time and now it appears to have happened. Government employment is where the real salaries are located.

In America, the unproductive bureaucrat is rewarded far more than their counterparts in the productive sector of the economy.

USA Today:

At a time when workers' pay and benefits have stagnated, federal employees' average compensation has grown to more than double what private sector workers earn, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

Federal workers have been awarded bigger average pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years in a row. The compensation gap between federal and private workers has doubled in the past decade.

Federal civil servants earned average pay and benefits of $123,049 in 2009 while private workers made $61,051 in total compensation, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The data are the latest available.

[...]

"The data are not useful for a direct public-private pay comparison," says Colleen Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union.

Chris Edwards, a budget analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, thinks otherwise. "Can't we now all agree that federal workers are overpaid and do something about it?" he asks.

Yes, but what to do about it? Who is going to take the bureaucrat's money away from them? Capping pay and altering benefit packages might be a good idea but watch and see if any politician - Republican or Democrat - has the nerve to propose it.

Like the apparatchiks in the old communist system, federal bureaucrats will loyally support the party of government in order to keep the gravy train going. And like communist societies, it will soon be the highest aspiration of a citizen to work for government. Little kids will grow up dreaming about it. Parents will push their kids into government employment. Jokes about the poor schmucks who aren't smart enough or politically connected enough to work for the government will become staple.

In the meantime, "public service" becomes a distant memory.