What are they complaining about?
by David Atkins (“thereisnospoon”)
Matt Yglesias has the most profound insight into today’s jobless numbers:
Looks like we had 17,000 thousand new private sector jobs in August, which were 100 percent offset by 17,000 lost jobs in the public sector.
The striking zero result should galvanize minds, but it’s worth noting that this has been the trend all year. The public sector has been steadily shrinking. According to the conservative theory of the economy, when the public sector shrinks that should super-charge the private sector. What’s happened in the real world has been that public sector shrinkage has simply been paired with anemic private sector growth. This is what I’ve called “The Conservative Recovery.” Conservatives complain about the results because the President is a Democrat named Barack Obama. But the policy result is what conservatives say they want.
Public sector job losses, private sector job gains, in a neat 1-to-1 correspondence. Isn’t that exactly what the tea party crowd wanted?
The Very Serious Journalists should certainly be asking Republicans those questions.
Also, they might want to ask just how many more government jobs must be cut before private sector job gains outpace those cuts by the sorts of 10-to-1 margins that it would take to bring the country back to full employment. Probing on the exact mechanism by which firing school teachers will push big corporations to create jobs would be nice, too.
Not holding my breath, though.
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