The Conservative Recovery

Here’s the shape of the past 12 months’ worth of job growth:

In a normal year, government employment goes up. After all, the population is growing so providing the same quantity of public services requires more personnel. At the same time, the workforce is growing so it’s possible for the economy to support a larger quantity of public sector workers. And you would assume that during a period of allegedly explosive growth in the size and scope of government, that public sector employment would increase by an unusually large amount. Instead, it fell.

Which is to say that conservatives have been getting the kind of economic recovery they say they want. The private sector is growing and the public sector is shrinking.

I say: the net impact of this has been terrible. They say: what? I don’t know. Generally they deny that it’s even happening. But is the conservative line that had we laid off more government workers the private sector would have both picked up all that slack and also created even more extra jobs on top of that? My view is that that’s backwards. The best time to seek to streamline the public sector is when the private economy is humming along. When the economy is growing strongly, if you lay off a janitor at the DMV he can get a job as a janitor at the new office building across the street. When the economy is growing, if the state lays off an accountant then the manufacturing firm across town might hire a new accountant. But when the economy is weak, you lay off the janitor and it takes him 12 months to find a new job. During that time, all the stores he used to shop at have lost a customer. And all those lost customers are a drag on the entire value chain of manufacturing, shipping, and retailing of goods. That, in turn, makes it harder for laid off workers to find new jobs further delaying the pace of transition.

To me, that’s what’s happening here. But what do conservatives think? They don’t even seem able to acknowledge that government is shrinking.