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The Recession's Fat Cats: Public Employees
Last week, the Huffington Post (here) was all over this new study showing that low-income workers got hit more severely during the recession than high-income workers (low-income workers suffer an over 30 percent unemployment rate, workers making about $138,000, only a 3.2 percent.)

The data in this study, which turned out to be quite misleading, certainly makes for nice populist headlines. But it is hiding the true debate that we should be having. And that’s not that low-skill workers are vulnerable to recession (duh) but that public-sector employees still have jobs and private employees don’t....

...In the course of a year, government employment has decreased by 296,000 jobs to 4.3% unemployment; during the same period, employment in the private, non-agricultural, sector has decreased by 2.3 million jobs to 11.1%. (And if you look at not seasonally adjusted unemployment data, the lose of private jobs reached 3.1 million and the lose of public jobs is roughly 70,000. That’s quite a gap.)

From January 2009 to January 2010, plummeting employment has been concentrated in the private sector. During the time period examined, employment in the private sector decreased by 3.5% while employment within government decreased by 0.5%. ...

...By the way, public-sector employees are also the ones benefiting from the stimulus funding, not the private-sector employees. The job-creation data reveals that most of the jobs were “created or saved” in the public sector. Based on data from Recovery.gov, we find that of the 640,000 jobs the administration claims to have created with stimulus funds, only some 140,765 of them were private jobs....