WASHINGTON - More than 8 million jobs have now been lost in the recession-- 4.2 million in 2009 alone. But the pinch isn't hurting jobs in the federal government.

$100,000+ Fed Jobs Soaring

Government salaries are getting pretty impressive. About 19 percent of federal government workers now make more than $100,000 a year-- up from 14 percent in the last 18 months.

Conservative economist Peter Ferrara is the director of entitlement and budget policy at the Texas-based Institute for Policy Innovation. He gave CBN News two examples of where the number of high salary jobs has skyrocketed.

"At the Transportation Department they went from one person making $170,000 or more to 1,700 making $170,000 or more," he said. "The number of people at the Defense Department making $150,000 or more increased by five times."

Public Sector Gain, Private Sector Loss

All those dollars pouring into the pockets of federal workers, however, has to come from the private sector, meaning it could be harming the rest of the economy.

Ferrara explained money spent on taxes can't be spent on investment.

"Jobs come from investment and that's where you're going to get the new jobs. And if they're borrowing a trillion dollars out of the economy for government spending, they're not going to get the investment to create jobs," he said. "And that's why we're suffering with double-digit unemployment."

"And if they keep going back to that like they did in the 1930s, they're just going to keep extending the unemployment longer and longer," Ferrara continued.

While many millions of Americans in the private sector are left out in the cold, more and more government workers close to $10,000 a month.

And that kind of luxurious spending in the government sector is just what could keep the private sector from generating the jobs millions of out-of-work Americans need.