Government Workers Now Outnumber Manufacturing Workers by 9,977,000

[dan_bgblue]

That is an astounding number and one that is particularly troubling. We have almost double the number of people drawing a paycheck working at a job that creates absolutely no wealth and hinders those trying to create wealth, than we do people drawing a paycheck working at a job that creates wealth.

I realize that many of those government jobs provide critical services to us all, but geeze it seems like there are more caretakers than necessary, especially when we consider the massive downsizing of the military work force

Linkage

[CitizenBBN]

Sums up the problems pretty well IMO.

[Darrell KSR]

Let's be careful here to make sure we know what we are comparing. First, the article linked is a little confusing, at least to me. But I get confused by a box of cereal, so I may be the only one. Anyway, the 22.2 million government employees listed includes ALL government--state, local, federal, etc.

In fact, federal government employees are "only" 2.75 million, the lowest since the 1960's. (And the 22.2 million number is actually 22.4 million now. Here's a link to the up-to-date figures: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t17.htm)

Also, the 2.75 million federal government employees includes 593,000 U.S. Postal Workers, a quasi-federal employee position, too.

So there are about 2 million federal and 20+ million "other."

That includes 14.4 million LOCAL government. And that includes education (local government education is 8 million workers, for example, about 4x the number of all federal government workers combined).

The Obama administration initially increased federal government employees through additional hiring in department of Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans affairs, before allowing attrition to return it to the low numbers we see now. And if it is the lowest it has been in half a century, I'm calling it low, even if there is some surplusage, waste, unneeded positions, etc.

But the vast majority of the number--about 20 of the 22 million cited in your article -- is purely local and state government, with most of it in education. To me, that's a little misleading, or at least, confusing.

[dan_bgblue]

When I posted that, I made a bad assumption. I assumed that because the language contained in the article never mentioned "federal government employees" that it would be obvious that the number of employees was all government workers, federal, state, and local county, township, and city. My bad for not mentioning that.

I do not know that the number contains the postal service. It very well may, but since they are not true federal employees, it may not as well.

There are approximately 120 million people working 35 hours or more per week for a paycheck in this country. This does not take into account small business owners and self employed persons that are one man/woman shops.

So if I look at it this way, there are 22 million persons drawing a paycheck that is funded by our tax dollars at all levels assigned to jobs that assist, regulate, etc. the workforce that make it possible for them to get a paycheck every pay period. That is one government worker for every 6 working persons.

[CitizenBBN]

The bloat is everywhere. Funny enough I imagine there is less in the federal level than the state and local in many cases, but the main reason I assume the federal number is so low now is the huge reduction in our armed forces.

But I imagine that federal number is artificially much lower than the real drain of government on the economy b/c so much work esp. in the military sector is now contracted out.

I don't count those people as private jobs per se b/c many of them are doing a job still 100% funded by tax money and done not to increase the level of wealth in the nation. They don't make THINGS or arbitrage things or provide services that generate wealth in most cases, they are simply doing government jobs but through a private contractor.

that's not bad, we need a lot of that work to be done, but the real question this raises is this: how many Americans are going to work every day to a job that grows the pie and how many are working simply to sort out how the pie is divided?

The military is a necessary evil in that sense, a large expense but one we bear so we can have a country. Many of those contracted jobs are part of that, but they are still a weight on the economy in that they aren't making cars or building homes or such. There is some of that in research and such that does have a net gain, but in the end it would be ideal to beat our swords into plowshares, it's just not feasible now.

But at the state and local level there is a ton of just overhead and cost. Even in education, I just about can't imagine less efficient systems. The US routinely is listed as spending the most per child on education despite being dozens of spots out of first place in the quality of education delivered.

The problem is that demand for services hasn't gone down as the nation has grown, but two things have gone against us. First more and more of those services are provided by the government and bureaucratic decisions instead of the free market, and second the part of the workforce and economy that actually creates wealth by making and moving goods has steadily declined.

I will add that the private sector number is likely also misleading b/c it may not include things like software developers and the IT area, etc., and that absolutely is creating wealth, so that number is probably wrong as well.

So while I have no doubt that government is way too big and bloated, I imagine we'd have to dig more into both numbers to try to get a better apples to apples comparison of wealth creation versus wealth distribution and overhead.

[Darrell KSR]

Dan, the link I provided actually breaks it down. I used the snipping tool here to just snip the current numbers (it shows the postal workers taken out number, too).

Of the 22 million, most are teachers. Hard to complain about teachers, isn't it? And 14+ million is squarely within our control at the local government level.

I'm just not sure it's the problem portrayed. When you start carving out education and local government, there's not as much remaining to deal with. Some, but not a major issue--JMO.

Government workers.JPG

EDIT--one correction that doesn't really impact the discussion, but the "snipped" numbers, and the numbers I used are actually from October 2015. The October 2016 numbers couldn't be "snipped" without including three other columns, so it wasn't as nice and neat.

The true numbers are:

22.6 million total government, all sectors, all occupations
2.8 million federal government
600k U.S. Postal workers included
14.5 million local, including teachers; 5.3 million state, including teachers

Sorry for the error.

[CitizenBBN]

I'll complain about teachers somewhat. It includes teachers but also I'm sure all administrators, and that's a big area of budgetary bloat in the country.

I have an easy fix too, an issue near and dear to my heart: tuition tax credits. It would fix education in this country really fast. It isn't perfect, but it's better than the socialized education system we use now.