Good encryption should be indistinguishable from random strings. What is the chance that it could be compressed by at least one byte? There are 256^n strings with a length of n bytes. Since we want to be able to recover the original string, each compressed string must decompress to one decompressed string. There are 256^(n-1) strings of length n-1 bytes. This means that only (256^(n-1))/(256^n) = 1/256 strings of length n can be compressed by one byte. For more highly compressed strings, the chances get worse. This is why trying to compress the data would be useless.