Paul Krugman's column today offers the Nobel laureate economist's explanation for the slow economic recovery: "Right now Washington is focused on the idiocy of the sequester, but this is only the latest episode in an unprecedented run of declines in public employment and government purchases that have crippled our economy's recovery."
Here is the unprecedented decline in public employment to which Professor Krugman refers, according to the seasonally adjusted data from the Labor Department's Current Employment Statistics survey:
Year | Number of Government (federal, state, and local) employees in December |
2004 | 21,693,000 |
2005 | 21,879,000 |
2006 | 22,088,000 |
2007 | 22,376,000 |
2008 | 22,556,000 |
2009 | 22,480,000 |
2010 | 22,267,000 |
2011 | 21,950,000 |
2012 | 21,873,000 (preliminary) |
After what Professor Krugman calls the "unprecedented run of declines in public employment," there were still 180,000 more government employees in December of 2012 than there were in December of 2004. On a percentage basis, the decline from 22.6 million government employees at the 2008 peak to 21.9 million government employees at the 2012 low (3 percent!) seems hardly large enough to be as crippling as Professor Krugman claims it has been. On a percentage basis, it's not unprecedented, either; government employment fell to 15.9 million in July 1982 from 16.6 million in April 1980, a steeper decline (four percent) over a shorter time span. Professor Krugman's claim that the decline in public employment is unprecedented is inaccurate.
Professor Krugman calls policies he disagrees with "idiocy," but here at Smarterimes we have a more civil and modulated tone, so we won't characterize the professor's column other than to say that it's inaccurate and we disagree with it.