{"id":54154,"date":"2013-03-30T11:30:32","date_gmt":"2013-03-30T16:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.lclark.edu\/hart-landsberg\/?p=1489"},"modified":"2013-07-06T14:40:24","modified_gmt":"2013-07-06T19:40:24","slug":"the-austerity-agenda-and-public-employment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/03\/30\/the-austerity-agenda-and-public-employment\/","title":{"rendered":"The Austerity Agenda and Public Employment"},"content":{"rendered":"

While some austerity advocates really fear (although incorrectly) the consequences of deficit spending, the strongest proponents are actually only concerned<\/a> with slashing government programs or the use of public employees to provide them. \u00a0In other words their aim is to weaken public programs and\/or convert them into opportunities for private profit. One measure of their success has been the steady decline in public employment. \u00a0Floyd Norris, writing in the New York Times notes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

For jobs, the past four years have been a wash.<\/p>\n

The December jobs figures out today indicate that there were 725,000 more jobs in the private sector than at the end of 2008 \u2014 and 697,000 fewer government jobs. That works into a private-sector gain of 0.6 percent, and a government sector decline of 3.1 percent.<\/p>\n

In total, the number of people with jobs is up by 28,000, or 0.02 percent.<\/p>\n

How does that compare? It is by far the largest four-year decline in government employment since the 1944-48 term. That decline was caused by the end of World War II; this one was caused largely by budget limitations.<\/p>\n

The chart below, taken from the same post, also reveals just how weak private sector job creation has been over the past 12 years (compare the top three rows — the presidencies of Obama and Bush — w \"job<\/a> This graphic from the\u00a0New York Times<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>highlights just how significant the decline in public employment has been in this business cycle compared with past ones. \u00a0Each line shows the percentage change in public sector employment for specified months after the start of a recession. \u00a0Our recent recession began December 2007 and ended June 2009. \u00a0 As you can see, what is happening now is far from usual.<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It is also worth noting that despite claims that most Americans want to see cuts in major federal government programs, the survey data show the opposite. \u00a0For example, see the following graphic from Catherine Rampell\u2019s blog post<\/a>. \"economix-22pewwhattocut-blog480\"<\/a> As Rampell explains:<\/p>\n

In every category except for \u201caid to world\u2019s needy,\u201d more than half of the respondents wanted either to keep spending levels the same or to increase them. In the \u201caid to world\u2019s needy\u201d category, less than half wanted to cut spending.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, this assault on government spending and employment will have real consequences for the economy and job creation. All of this takes us back to the starting point — we are talking policy here. \u00a0Whose interests are served by these trends?<\/p>\nMartin Hart-Landsberg is a professor of economics at Lewis and Clark College<\/a>. You can follow him at Reports from the Economic Front<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While some austerity advocates really fear (although incorrectly) the consequences of deficit spending, the strongest proponents are actually only concerned with slashing government programs or the use of public employees to provide them.  In other words their aim is to weaken public programs and\/or convert them into opportunities for private profit. One measure of their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1853,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[29,36,34,2123,252,253,3920,85,304,309,76],"class_list":["post-54154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-class","tag-economics","tag-education","tag-environmentnature","tag-healthmedicine","tag-history","tag-nation-united-states","tag-politics","tag-the-state","tag-warmilitary","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1853"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54154"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56135,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54154\/revisions\/56135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}