In an analysis at Bloomberg, Justin Fox notes “where the jobs aren’t”:
Even as the economy as a whole was beginning to add jobs in 2010, government — with the exception of a temporary federal hiring spurt for the 2010 Census — was shedding them. Local governments, which have more employees than the states and the federal government combined, had shed 448,000 jobs by June 2013.
The problem with his observation is his horizon. If you change the horizon you’re looking at to consider 2006 to date, you see a somewhat different different picture. Until the late recession state and local governments were on a spending spree. State and local governments have been trimming their payroll back from their peak in 2009 until today they’re just a bit higher than they were in 2006.
IMO the question that should be considered is how many state and local jobs should there be? The metric I’d propose is that the number of state and local employees should rise with income first, population second. That’s a practical necessity for state and local government, most of which are required by law to balance their budgets.
In other words if you want more state and local government employees, you should want incomes to rise.
IMO the question that should be considered is how many state and local jobs should there be? …
I am old fashioned, and I believe in only hiring as many workers as it takes to do the job.
All the other workers are welfare recipients. It would be cheaper to mail them their check – no office space, no office furniture, no office supplies, and they would save money on clothing and travel expenses.
It may be that I worded that clumsily. I think that income should be a limiting factor on state employment. That having been said, in service businesses “as many workers as it takes to do the job” is a pretty malleable concept. How do you make that determination in government?
The first step would be to determine what actually needs to be done. Then, there are historic metrics for government and private sector personnel requirements.
I do not believe in the government as a jobs program, but fraud, waste and abuse do not keep me up at night. In any bureaucracy, they are a factor, and to a degree, they are the fat that smoothes out lean times. I also think of it as the oil that keeps the machine running.
In many cases, the money and effort to root out the examples is a waste of money. Many of them are petty, or they do have some minor purpose. I forgot what it was, but the shrimp on a treadmill did result in some productive research.
In addition, a lot of this money allows the recipient to stay open or in business. That might have been what allowed that department to keep that researcher employed. STEM people need to eat.
You can also afford to hire more of them if the compensation packages for each are lower…