Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
A friend of mine recently asked me what the unemployment rate would be today but for Tea-Publican "austerity" measures reducing public sector employment during a job recession. While I have posted about this before, here is the most recent study from Brookings: Without government job cuts, unemployment would be at 7.1 percent:
Government employment is at historic lows, largely due to draconian budget cuts at the state and local levels throughout the recession. The sector has now lost more jobs than any other major industry over the past three years, Bloomberg Government points out:
Without those job losses, the unemployment rate would be more than a full percentage point lower:
Had the percentage of people working for government held at the 2001-2007 average of 9.7 percent, about 1.7 million more Americans would have been employed in June and the jobless rate would have been 7.1 percent rather than 8.2 percent, according to economists Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
This is the price of Tea-Publican austerity measures to maintain their partisan talking point that unemployment has remained above 8% during President Obama's term of office. They should not be rewarded for purposefully sabotaging the U.S. economy after nearly destroying it completely with the Bush Great Recession.
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