It’s still night time in America
by digby
Gee, I wonder why we still have high unemployment?
Bloomberg’s Julianna Goldman looks at the impact of shrinking government jobs on the overall unemployment rate. Just 9% of the population worked for the government in July as public payrolls have been cut 640, 000 since the end of the recession. Economists say the jobless rate would be 7.1 percent if the share of the population working for the government from 2001-2007 were still in their jobs.
That would have been lower than Reagan’s 7.2% when he declared morning in America. Which was the Obama plan. Except they forgot that slashing “government” translates to slashing jobs. Ooops.
This all goes back to the deficit fetish that’s been an obsessive concern of this administration since the beginning and which is going to come sharply back into focus as soon as the election is over. I wish I understood what they thought they were doing, but I suppose that if they win re-election whatever it was will be seen to be vindicated and they’ll do more of it.
Meanwhile, here’s the alternative Mitt Romney spouting some gibberish which nobody can trace to any known facts, studies or models:
One thing that distinguishes this recovery is that public sector jobs, government jobs, have already fallen by 650,000. Given the conservative goal of shrinking government, is this a positive development or a negative one?
Well, clearly you don’t like to hear [about] anyone losing a job. At the same time, government is the least productive—the federal government is the least productive of our economic sectors. The most productive is the private sector. The next most productive is the not-for-profit sector, then comes state and local governments, and finally the federal government. And so moving responsibilities from the federal government to the states or to the private sector will increase productivity. And higher productivity means higher wages for the American worker. All right? America is the highest productivity nation of major nations in the world, and that results in our having, for instance, an average compensation about 30 percent higher than the average compensation in Europe. A government that becomes more productive, that does more with less, is good for the earnings of the American worker, and ultimately it will mean that our taxes don’t have to go up, that small businesses will find it easier to start and grow, and we will be able to add more private sector jobs. Don’t forget! It’s the private sector jobs that pay for government workers. So if you have fewer government workers doing work more and more productively, that means private sector work will grow.
If you say so Mitt.
So, we have one presidential candidate who has already presided over a huge shrinkage of the government workforce and is ready to negotiate four trillion more(give or take a trillion) in future cuts. And we have another one who is clearly clueless and will do whatever Zombie Ayn Rand and her living boytoy Paul Ryan tell him to do. Sigh.
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