Putting the lie to yet another right wing talking point that Obama is a big-government liberal, The Atlantic has posted an article entitled We Now Have Our Smallest Government in 45 Years, which makes the case that, when adjusted for the change in population, this is the smallest ratio of government employment to population since 1968.
http://www.theatlantic.com/...
Since the official end of the Great Recession, America's public sector has shrunk. And shrunk. And shrunk some more. We've said goodbye to about 600,000 government jobs, handing the economy a nasty self-inflicted wound in the process.
But how small has our public sector really become? Here's one way to think about it: Compared to our population, it hasn't been this size since 1968. Your dreams are coming true Baby Boomers. We're almost all the way back to the Summer of Love!
The problem is that, while this is good news if you're a conservative, it is actually bad news for the American economy.
So how badly has this actually hurt the job market? The Hamilton [Project] folks estimate that, if the share of government workers was back to 2007 levels, we'd have about 1.7 million more jobs than we do today. Now, did we have the balance right before the recession? That's for a much longer conversation. But it's certainly food for thought.
These are the fruits of Tea-Party America: fewer jobs, a sluggish economy and reduced services.
Some interesting charts can be found here:
http://www.hamiltonproject.org/...