9600 to 500
2010-10-26 - by
Every now and then a fellow stumbles across a fact so eye-popping the moment he sees it he feels the ground shifting beneath his feet.
The other day in the newspaper a headline blared in big black letters that North Carolina’s unemployment rate had dropped, which sounded like good news until I read (in the first paragraph) that the number of people out of work hadn’t dropped one bit.
Now, how could unemployment drop, but the number of people out of work stay the same? Suspecting that the politicians might be jiggering the unemployment rates I read on and discovered the drop wasn’t because people had found jobs – but because they’d given up looking and dropped out of the work force. The article didn’t explain where the ‘drop outs’ went but it left no doubt they’ve vanished. As one economist said bluntly: The work force shrunk.
It got odder. In September, North Carolina’s economy created 10,100 new jobs, which didn’t sound too bad either. But then the blow fell: 9600 of those jobs were government jobs and only 500 were in the private businesses.
Surprised, I thought, That must be backwards. But it wasn’t. Government is growing like topsy. While the private sector is stagnant. Or worse.
Up until now I’d figured all the talk about America turning into a socialist nation under President Obama was election year hyperbole – that there is surely, given Obama’s proclivities, a lot more government today than there used to be but we were still pretty far from becoming France or Greece. But it’s hard to argue with a statistic: Anyway you cut it last month, probably for the first time ever, nineteen out of every twenty new jobs created in North Carolina were government jobs.
9600 to 500
2010-10-26/
Every now and then a fellow stumbles across a fact so eye-popping the moment he sees it he feels the ground shifting beneath his feet.
The other day in the newspaper a headline blared in big black letters that North Carolina’s unemployment rate had dropped, which sounded like good news until I read (in the first paragraph) that the number of people out of work hadn’t dropped one bit.
Now, how could unemployment drop, but the number of people out of work stay the same? Suspecting that the politicians might be jiggering the unemployment rates I read on and discovered the drop wasn’t because people had found jobs – but because they’d given up looking and dropped out of the work force. The article didn’t explain where the ‘drop outs’ went but it left no doubt they’ve vanished. As one economist said bluntly: The work force shrunk.
It got odder. In September, North Carolina’s economy created 10,100 new jobs, which didn’t sound too bad either. But then the blow fell: 9600 of those jobs were government jobs and only 500 were in the private businesses.
Surprised, I thought, That must be backwards. But it wasn’t. Government is growing like topsy. While the private sector is stagnant. Or worse.
Up until now I’d figured all the talk about America turning into a socialist nation under President Obama was election year hyperbole – that there is surely, given Obama’s proclivities, a lot more government today than there used to be but we were still pretty far from becoming France or Greece. But it’s hard to argue with a statistic: Anyway you cut it last month, probably for the first time ever, nineteen out of every twenty new jobs created in North Carolina were government jobs.