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We’ve been talking about how this Great Recession, and its aftermath, represents a private-sector recovery and a public-sector depression. We haven’t seen government payrolls get slashed this deeply in some time in America. In fact, we now have statistics to put to that, courtesy of Jordan Weissman at the Atlantic. He looks at the ratio of government employment – at the local, state and federal levels – to the US population, and finds that the ratio is at its smallest point since 1968. That’s displayed in the chart above.
In 1968, we were just at the beginning of delivering Medicare and Medicaid. We had a smaller government sector in terms of the services they provided. But now, we have the same ratio of government employees to the population doling out that larger amount of services, and performing that larger amount of tasks. It’s impossible for this to lead to anything but a poorer provision of those services, and poorer performance of those tasks.
And who does this hurt? The most vulnerable segments of society, who inevitably qualify for more government services. Slashing government in this fashion inevitably rebounds back on the poor and the sick and the weak. But it also hurts the broader economy. The Hamilton Project, a centrist think tank, estimates that, if we had the same level of government employees to population that we had in 2007, we would have 1.7 million more workers on the job today. That’s enough to bring the unemployment rate down at least a full point, and probably closer to an even 7.0%.
And while this cutback of the government sector has slowed down, it still registers in negative territory; in the most recent employment report, government lost another 9,000 jobs.
This is the economy that conservatives claim to want, saying that slashing government spending – and inevitably that means government jobs – will free up the private sector to innovate and strive, and create jobs. Yet that hasn’t happened in any meaningful way. This conservative fantasy has failed.
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Poor dday. You still think facts are relevant to anything going on inside the beltway.
The notion that all federal jobs are necessary is utterly false. We need to abolish the DEA, the Dept. of Fatherland Security and dramatically downsize the Pentagon. Endless wars and an ever growing police state don’t help anyone but the profiteers.
Worker productivity has gone up quite a bit since 1968. You don’t think computers have made it possible for government workers to do more?
As Somerby might say, one for the rubes!
Your point seems to rest on the notion that government services cannot become more efficiently provided over time. Contrary to some reports, governments are increasingly using computers instead of paper.
One point about that chart is that many government services are note closely related to our population. Medicare yes, but Foreign Service, SEC, FDIC, and others should not grow just because the population does.
I’ve spent some of my consulting years working at the Army and the Navy to implement software to update their technology. We were taking 21st century technology and having to interface it to card readers dating back to the 1950s. For every one of those antiquated systems we replaced, probably hundreds of jobs across the country were permanently lost, mostly through attrition. I know my two projects were not the only ones in progress.
At the same time, I have to say that the people I worked with from the client side on these projects were not always the smartest people. In some instances, I wondered how they would survive in the private sector, if forced to find other work.