The Wall Street Journal
written by
Thursday October 20, 2011
Harry Reid carries a heavy burden these days, blocking and tackling for an unpopular President's unpopular agenda while trying to hold onto a Senate majority in 2012. So perhaps we should be forgiving when the Majority Leader says what he did yesterday on the Senate floor:
"It's very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it's the public-sector jobs where we've lost huge numbers, and that's what this legislation is all about."
Then again, he really said that.
Mr. Reid was trying to defend a new Democratic proposal to spend another $35 billion that the government doesn't have to help states hire teachers and other public workers. He seems to be under the impression that private job creation is doing well, and that happy days would be here again if we could only gin up more government jobs.
So let's go to the videotape. According to the White House budget office, the federal executive branch had 1.875 million civilian full-time equivalent employees when the financial crisis hit in 2008. Two years later, that number had risen by 253,000 jobs to 2.128 million, a 13.5% increase.
The budget office predicted earlier this year that the number would fall slightly to 2.101 million in fiscal 2011, which ended on September 30, but then rise again in 2012 to 2.116 million. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in September that overall federal government employment had fallen by 30,000 jobs from September 2010, but that's after the rapid rise under President Obama. There's been no jobs recession in the Beltway.
So perhaps Mr. Reid is referring to state and local government jobs? Well, the Labor Department report for September shows that state governments have cut payrolls by all of 49,000 since September 2010, to 5.089 million. Local governments have reduced employment at a somewhat faster pace—by 210,000 workers in the last year, to 14.076 million.
The pace of these state and local cuts have picked up this year, as the federal stimulus spending has declined. But Democrats promised in 2009 that the stimulus would be temporary—to help states get through the recession. State and local governments now have no choice but to cut workers, as they adjust to a new and reduced level of tax revenue thanks to the slow economic recovery.
As for the private jobs market, it's hard to see what Mr. Reid could possibly mean when he says it is "doing just fine." Private nonfarm employers added only 137,000 new jobs in September and 352,000 in the last three months. That's why the overall jobless rate remains an unprecedented 9.1% two years into an ostensible economic recovery.
Going back to 2008, the Labor Department reported 111.822 million employed private workers at the end of 2008. The number plunged during the recession, and as of September of this year overall private employment had climbed back to 109.349 million. But that's still some 2.5 million fewer jobs than in 2008. If this is doing fine, we'd hate to see Mr. Reid's definition of lousy.
What these numbers show is that, contrary to Mr. Reid, the real U.S. jobs problem continues to be in the private economy. If private employers were hiring at the pace they normally do in an economic recovery, we might be doing fine.
In any case, Mr. Reid's latest stimulus proposal isn't intended to help private employers. Its goal is to help state and local government workers, especially teachers, most of whom are unionized and pay dues that can finance Democratic Senate campaigns. The $35 billion would operate as a campaign-finance pass-through account, from Senate Democrats to unions and back to Senate Democrats.
Mr. Reid knows his proposal can't pass the House, and perhaps not even the Senate, so his real agenda is to stage a vote that Republicans will oppose so President Obama can claim on the stump that Democrats are doing something to help create jobs and that Republicans stopped them.
Instead, Mr. Reid's comments yesterday reveal that he and his fellow Democrats inhabit an economic universe in which government is the main engine of job creation. That's how you get a jobs crisis.
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