If you work in the private sector, when was the last time your company spent money to conduct a study to conclude that its employees were underpaid?

If your employer was a publicly traded company, depending on the cost and the ridiculousness of the conclusions, stockholders probably would get pretty irritated.

Yet this seems to be a tactic that government institutions employ whenever they decide the time is right to give themselves raises. Have you ever heard one of these studies conclude that the employees of a taxpayer-funded organization are overpaid?