Inside Track
Private Sector Shrinking, Public Sector Growing in Most States
Despite the Obama administration’s claims of economic growth, the truth is that in most states the private sector is shrinking and the public sector is expanding as a proportion of the workforce. In fact, say researchers Keith Hall and Robert Greene, since the beginning of the Great Recession, the private sector has shed jobs in almost every state, while the increase in taxpayer-funded employment has been masked by the use of contractors rather than outright employees.
“In 2012,” Hall and Greene wrote in a November 25 report for George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, “public-sector employment made up more than 16 percent of the U.S. labor market.” That in itself is bad enough; but as the men observed, “Direct government employment fails to capture the full impact of government spending on state labor markets.”
To determine that “full impact,” Hall and Greene estimated the number of jobs in each state that are funded by federal contract dollars and added them to the number of actual public employees in that state. When they did that, they found that public-sector employment grew by almost 3.5 million jobs to a national average of 19.2 percent of the workforce. In other words, nearly one-fifth of all workers in the United States are employed either directly or indirectly by government.
JBS Member or ShopJBS.org Customer?
Sign in with your ShopJBS.org account username and password or use that login to subscribe.
Subscribe Now
- 24 Issues Per Year
- Digital Edition Access
- Exclusive Subscriber Content
- Audio provided for all articles
- Unlimited access to past issues
- Cancel anytime.
- Renews automatically
Subscribe Now
- 24 Issues Per Year
- Print edition delivery (USA)
*Available Outside USA - Digital Edition Access
- Exclusive Subscriber Content
- Audio provided for all articles
- Unlimited access to past issues
- Cancel anytime.
- Renews automatically