We already knew President Obama’s “the private sector is doing fine” remark was a farce. Even Jay Carney knows it, but he’s good at pretending he doesn’t. Saying the private-sector job market is healthy is like calling a cancer patient who is in the final stages of chemotherapy healthy.
However, in comparison to the business world, federal employment is also not doing fine. It’s doing superb, as the number of federal government jobs has spiked 225,000 above its January 2008 numbers.
A peek at payroll data shows it all:
Private-sector jobs are still down by 4.6 million, or 4%, from January 2008, when overall employment peaked. Meanwhile government jobs are down just 407,000, or 1.8%. Federal employment actually is 225,000 jobs above its January 2008 level, an 11.4% increase. That’s right, up 11.4%. …
The recession was boomtime for federal employment, especially after Obama took office. Federal jobs kept rising (excluding a temporary Census surge in early 2010) until March 2011 — more than three years after overall payrolls peaked.
Obama’s so-called economic stimulus law ignored the private sector, while doling out billions of dollars to local and state governments. Of course, that only postponed the day when states and cities had to slash spending. They started cutting jobs in 2010, but the job cuts have recently come to a halt — averaging fewer than 4,000 cuts per month since last November.
Obama has a severe case of tunnel vision. The problem is, he sees the job market through the eyes of a socialist bureaucrat.
