The Mike Nichols film, The Graduate, slightly re-imagined:
Mr. McGuire: I just want to say two words to you. Just two words.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Government employment
Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?
Well, Benjamin, 73% of all jobs created in the last 5 months have been government jobs.
Seventy-three percent of the new civilian jobs created in the United States over the last five months are in government, according to official data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In June, a total of 142,415,000 people were employed in the U.S, according to the BLS, including 19,938,000 who were employed by federal, state and local governments.
By November, according to data BLS released today, the total number of people employed had climbed to 143,262,000, an overall increase of 847,000 in the six months since June.
In the same five-month period since June, the number of people employed by government increased by 621,000 to 20,559,000. These 621,000 new government jobs created in the last five months equal 73.3 percent of the 847,000 new jobs created overall.
This is our present and foreseeable future. If I were the parent of a college graduate thinking of getting a master’s degree, I’d shoo him off to Georgetown or Harvard for an advanced degree in Public Administration.
Consider: The income of the average physician is going to drop substantially under Obamacare. Lawyers are a dime a dozen. Engineering degrees are fine, but who has the aptitude for that?
And an MBA? Maybe some brokerage house will hire your kid as a runner or something. Unless he or she is Ivy League, forget about it.
– not state.
I have to wonder how many people of the GOP’s tea parties, conservative parties, constitution parties, libertarian party, etc., derive income from government jobs, government contracts and subsides.
I’m a government employee sympathetic to the TEA party cause and most other libertarian proclivities. It can happen. What’s your point?
Point? Hypocrisy! Accuse certain classes of american citizens of being on the dole for government pay and government benefits; governments to big; government this and that, always in a negative tone. The point is that you want/demand small non intrusive government for everybody else but yourself and your particular brand of ideology.
Are you willing to give up your government job and benefits to lessen the economic burden on taxpayers and reduce the size of government? Most likely, you, like all the others in government, are not willing to entertain such and idea but choose to condemn your employer, pay and benefits nonetheless.
I’m a municipal employee who has spent years begging her colleagues to consider givebacks on some of our more ludicrously generous benefits during contract negotiations, so that a general default of our troubled city can possibly be avoided. Am I listened to? You know the answer.
You make me proud!
Zeke, perhaps Anon is doing worthwhile work and working hard at it. Would you ask that policemen who think there are too many schedule reviewers quit their jobs?
Seriously, not only are there plenty of federal government jobs which serve no purpose other than to employ people, but there are also some federal employees who not only do no work every day (not just no useful work) and who brag about the fact that they do nothing. None of them can be fired without meticulous collection of data on their lack of effort, which also takes the firing manager away from doing useful work. It’s worse if the non-worker who brags about it can also claim that some form of discrimination is being practiced. It’s far easier (and safer from a legal and career perspective) for the manager to simply shunt the person off to the side and continue supervising the people who actually work.
I’m not speaking theoretically. At every agency for which I’ve been a contractor, there were multiple people who were known to all as non-workers. They continued collecting paychecks and moving toward collecting their generous retirement pay with no worries about losing their jobs. It’s a morale-killer for everyone who knows them and every federal employee knows at least one of them.
You bring up a point that has been of interest to me for a longtime. Not only in the government sector, but the private sector also, there has been a huge labor bloat. The U.S. economy could well function at a high level of production and profit with an unemployment rate between 9 and 7.5%. However, that results in a critical states and federal government economic problem. A circular problem for which most haven’t a clue how to solve.
Solution? Decentralize and de-consolidate the nations economic sectors. Return to community economies such as machine shops, flour mills, feed mills, butcher shops, bakeries, creameries, frozen foods, regional parts manufacturing and assembly, etc. Lots more people would be productively working and inflationary variables would be more local than national and not least, more people paying taxes and into social benefits. Move the eligibility authority for disability to the States and county seat boards. Of course their will never be any such solutions as the lobbyists for big corporation consolidation and centralization is to strong.
These are the things that raised America up post-WWII creating the industrial revolution of sorts.
Once again, the silly leftist fallacy that small government means no government. Conservatives and libertarians (almost my entire office) happily work for government projects that are well-run and worthwhile. OK, worthwhile. I have yet to experience one that was close to being well-run. To be precise, I haven’t experienced FEDERAL projects which were well-run. I am quite pleased with my local and even state government though.
Cutting the government funding that funds the jobs of your office would be a great starting place in reducing the size and cost of government — would it not?
I’m sure that Peak could provide a budget-cutter with the names of those whose jobs could be cut that would actually result in increased efficiency.
What you’re doing is tell the person who is overweight to simply cut off their foot in order to lose weight.
Actually, diverting the core point to matters of ‘efficiency’ over that of ‘essential’ is not a cure for the ill. The fact is that there are far to many non essential employees of the government that in fact dilutes government efficiency. Redundency of authorities in the governments departments, agencies and corporations is grossly out of control. The administrative functions of social security, medicare and medicaid could be handled by the states at half the cost. Return the states national guards back to the states and under their original constitutional authority. Completely clean out the DoD and return it to its original constitutional authority leaving the president with only the authority to mobilize and deploy certain elements of the Marine Corps without a congressional wars power act. Leave nation building up to the skills of DoS. Return the FBI, DEA, ICE and all other intelligence organization back to their original constitutional purposes. We don’t need additional manpower of the FBI, DEA, ICE and the coast guard in legimate foreign war zones or any foreign nations! We don’t need contract para military forces hired by departments and agencies of the goverment. The list goes on forever it seems. The government simply has far to many non essential employees and redundency.
This is the fear-mongering that won Obama the election.
Quite a few. I might be one depending how you count. They are advancing the good of the country not their own pocketbook. We need more of that. Right?
Consider: The income of the average physician is going to drop substantially under Obamacare. Lawyers are a dime a dozen. Engineering degrees are fine, but who has the aptitude for that?
Further evidence that the USA is rapidly trying to become Greece. For the last two generations, Greeks have chosen government employment – when they could get it – as the Holy Grail of a false security. They’ll pretend to work, and the private economy will support them in their sinecures.
Now Obama’s doing his best to condemn the US to the same dead-end employment structure. The 1% in the private economy will be taxed to pay for it all, and the 99% of unionized gov’t commissars will do their bureaucratic best to supervise, regulate, contradict, deny, revise and second-guess every move of the evil one-percenters.
Hint to Rick Moran: Engineering isn’t superhuman, as you apparently believe. But unlike the liberal arts, you can’t bullshit your way through it spouting the party line. It’s not the aptitude, it’s the workload.
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Consider: The income of the average physician is going to drop substantially under Obamacare. Lawyers are a dime a dozen. Engineering degrees are fine, but who has the aptitude for that?
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Speaking as one with the aptitude for engineering, life is pretty good. In the last 60 days I bought a house and a convertible, and this will be the first six-figure year I’ve ever had on my W-2′s.
I don’t know that I’d be advocating government jobs right now, that chain is going to get yanked right soon. My girlfriend’s sister got an administration job at Berkeley and all I can think is when the budgets get cut they sure aren’t going to chop instructors first.
Hey I have an idea.
Why not just say that everybody who is on the dole is working for the government.
Unemployment would crate to almost zero immediately.
That would solve a lot of problems. With all those people working, the national debt would get paid off in no time, our credit rating would skyrocket, China would be very very happy, the poor BLS would have to stop working overtime to cook the unemploment statistics every month, and Obama would at last proof that he is the genius we all know him to be.
Paul Krugman – eat your heart out!!
If you check the statistics, there are, every year, about 500,000 more state employees in education in October than there are in July. Federal government saw a small decrease (16000 or so), while state governments excluding education remained constant. We got the bump we get every year in state education employee payrolls. Nothing either sinister or indicative of actual improvement in the economy.
That said, if there were 191,000 more Americans at the end of November than there were at the end of October while there are 490,000 fewer Americans working, and over a million (1,017,000) are no longer “in the labor force”, why is this a sign that things are “getting better”?