Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
Tea-Publican candidates love to claim that the size of the government has grown under President Obama -- probably because they heard it from some drug addled bloviating gas bag they listen to on the radio or they saw it on FAUX News Fraudcasting. But as Stephen Colbert said, "The facts have a well-known liberal bias."
The Atlantic reports We Now Have Our Smallest Government in 45 Years:
Since the official end of the Great Recession, America's public sector has shrunk. And shrunk. And shrunk some more. We've said goodbye to about 600,000 government jobs, handing the economy a nasty self-inflicted wound in the process.
But how small has our public sector really become? Here's one way to think about it: Compared to our population, it hasn't been this size since 1968.
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First, credit where it's due. The Hamilton Project has produced a beautiful graph illustrating the government employment to population ratio. As it shows, there are now fewer public sector employees per American than at any time dating back to the Carter administration (To be clear, we're talking state, federal, and local here).
To match where we are now, though, you actually have to head back to the days of LBJ. The graph below compares the number of government workers to our civilian, non-institutional population all the way to 1950. Again, we're right where we were in 1968.
So how badly has this actually hurt the job market? The Hamilton folks estimate that, if the share of government workers was back to 2007 levels, we'd have about 1.7 million more jobs than we do today.
I previously posted this chart from Ezra Klein, Public-sector austerity in one graph - The Washington Post:
On Friday, I ran some numbers on public-sector employment:
Since Obama was elected, the public sector has lost about 600,000 jobs. If you put those jobs back, the unemployment rate would be 7.8 percent.
But what if we did more than that? At this point in George W. Bush’s administration, public-sector employment had grown by 3.7 percent. That would be equal to a bit over 800,000 jobs today. If you add those hypothetical jobs, the unemployment rate falls to 7.3 percent.
Today, Ben Polak, chairman of the economics department at Yale University, and Peter K. Schott, professor of economics at the Yale School of Management, widen the lens, with similar results:
There is something historically different about this recession and its aftermath: in the past, local government employment has been almost recession-proof. This time it’s not. Going back as long as the data have been collected (1955), with the one exception of the 1981 recession, local government employment continued to grow almost every month regardless of what the economy threw at it. But since the latest recession began, local government employment has fallen by 3 percent, and is still falling. In the equivalent period following the 1990 and 2001 recessions, local government employment grew 7.7 and 5.2 percent. Even following the 1981 recession, by this stage local government employment was up by 1.4 percent...
Without this hidden austerity program, the economy would look very different. If state and local governments had followed the pattern of the previous two recessions, they would have added 1.4 million to 1.9 million jobs and overall unemployment would be 7.0 to 7.3 percent instead of 8.2 percent.
In the graph atop this post, I ran the numbers on total government employment after the 1981, 1990, 2001 and 2008 recessions. . . As you can see, government employment tends to rise during recessions, helping to cushion their impact. But with the exception of a spike when we hired temporary workers for the decennial census, it’s fallen sharply during this recession.
As Paul Krugman wrote, we already have a Republican economy today, and it doesn't work. This Republican Economy - NYTimes.com. We are doing exactly the opposite of what is prescribed to stimulate the economy out of a job recession.
I read in the Arizona Daily Star today that 'Something dramatic' needed to aid economy, Romney says. Um, no. We just need to go back to Econ 101 and do what we know actually works and throw the faith based supply-side "trickle down" GOP economics that is killing our economy on the ash heap of history. So what is Mittens "dramatic" solutions to create jobs?
Mitt Romney is calling for "something dramatic" to help the economy recover, but he's not saying exactly what.
The Republican presidential candidate says he opposes another federal stimulus package and new government programs. He also says that if the Federal Reserve were to undertake another "massive" program of buying government bonds and mortgage-backed securities [monetary expansion], with the goal of driving long-term interest rates even lower, it wouldn't help the recovery.
"I can absolutely make the case that now is the time for something dramatic and it is not the time to grow government.
Mittens Romney is an economics imbecile.
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