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Dear New York Times: Government Jobs Haven’t Gone Anywhere

Cry taxpayers a river: government has shed 1.5 percent of its workers since 2008.

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Over at the New York Times, Annie Lowrey poses the question: “Where did the government jobs go?” A large part of her answer will not surprise you (hint: it rhymes with “Recublicans”), but her broader assessment of the state of public employment in the United States (government jobs, she says, “have become increasingly difficult to find,” while at one time they were part of “the blue-collar jobs” that undergirded the middle class) reflects not merely partisan bias but a more fundamental problem with liberal political discourse.

Simply put: the Left has lost the ability to honestly assess the size of our government and the role it is supposed to play in our society.

“Since the recession hit,” Lowrey writes, “private employers have added five million jobs and the government has lost 323,000.” Lowrey refers to this as a “slow decimation” of the public sector. Slow indeed: at the beginning of the recession, in December 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted more than 22 million government employees in the United States. That works out to a measly 1.5 percent decrease in government jobs over nearly a decade.

“Where did the government jobs go?” Lowrey asks. Well, nowhere, really.

Mind the Small Stuff

This is, as a rule, one of the principal handicaps of liberal political discourse: the inability to properly and reasonably evaluate the breathtaking size of our country’s various governments. A few years ago, proposed cuts to the federal budget caused the Left to collapse into hysterics (a few samples from ThinkProgress alone: the cuts would “harm women,” “undermine tribal health care,” cause people to “suffer,” and “devastate already battered-programs”).

How much were the proposed cuts? A little more than 2 percent of the federal budget. For this, we were treated to liberal conniptions on a national scale.

The Left has figured something out: if you make a big deal out of the little stuff, you never have to deal with the big stuff. Stage a nationwide meltdown over a few billion dollars in budget cuts, and nobody will even think about touching Medicare. So it goes with government jobs, which are apparently “disappearing” at the rate of a little more than 1 percent every ten years.

Jobs Aren’t Welfare Benefits

Lowrey, in apparent zeal over public-sector employment, makes another implicit gaffe. As she points out, government employment “has long been home to the sorts of jobs that lift people into the middle class and keep them there.” This was indeed the case in postwar America and has continued to be the case in the twenty-first century.

Government employment is not supposed to be a sinecure farm or a publicly funded gravy train.

It is also a terrible way to run a public employment sector. Government cannot, as a rule, efficiently provide quality services while operating as a big, inexhaustible employment source for members of the lower middle class. Lowrey quotes a sociologist who points out that governments lack the ability to fire anyone in a “willy-nilly” fashion; what this means, of course, is that bad employees are kept from being fired far more securely than they are in the public sector. Anyone who has been to a bloated and sclerotic city hall can verify this, to say nothing of federally run agencies and state DMVs.

Practically speaking, this means government jobs are more secure than private sector ones, but that, invariably, most government services are run poorly and with substandard staff.

This isn’t the way government is supposed to work; it is not supposed to be a sinecure farm or a publicly funded gravy train. It is supposed to provide essential services the private sector cannot adequately provide on its own, not provide easy jobs for people who should be doing other things.

Certainly, losing a government job is just as painful as losing a private sector one. Anywhere government employment is reduced (even if by a miniscule amount) is a place where a private job should spring up to fill the gap. But this reduction is still necessary: a truly healthy economy can only come at the expense of an overlarge and burdensome public sector. To really drive up meaningful and wealth-creating employment, government will have to shrink; more government jobs will have to go. Over the next decade, let’s shoot for more than 1.5 percent.