President Obama made quite a gaffe Friday when just one week after the Labor Department announced horrid jobs numbers for May, he claimed "the private sector is doing fine."
Appearing on CBS's This Morning Monday, New York Times columnist and unashamed Obama shill Paul Krugman covered for the current White House resident saying, "He screwed up the line" (video follows with transcribed highlights and commentary):
Co-host Charlie Rose asked his guest, “How do you define how well the private sector is doing?”
Krugman responded, “That was an unfortunate line. I mean, the President bungled the line. The truth is, the private sector is doing better than the public sector, which is not well enough.”
“The real story about this economy,” he continued, “is that the cut-backs at the public sector are what’s hurting the recovery.”
Increased public sector jobs lead to increased private sector jobs? Actually, it's normally the other way around.
As the economy grows and businesses add to payrolls, tax revenues increase thereby giving federal, state, and local governments more money to add public employees.
Not surprising that a liberal economist wouldn't understand this, especially as he had been on This Morning a few weeks ago spouting the same nonsense.
So what's the truth about public sector job growth?
Well, at the federal level - which is really the only thing directly controlled by the White House and the United States Congress - there are currently 29,000 more employees than when Obama was inaugurated.
Attention liberal media members: that's an INCREASE!
At the state level, there are 125,000 fewer employees around the country than there were in January 2009, but that total is equal to what there were in July 2006 about a year and a half before the recession began.
The real decline in public sector employees since Obama's inauguration has been at the local level where there has been a 511,000 reduction back to the number in November 2005 two years before the recession started.
Why? Because local governments around the country have been increasing in size for decades at a rate that has been completely unsustainable.
Is it the federal government's responsibility to make up for this shortfall?
Liberal media members such as Krugman believe so. But should that be a permanent thing?
Let's assume more federal tax dollars are sent to local communities so that they can hire more teachers, firefighters, and police officers. Where does the money come from when those dollars are eliminated?
Have these communities been forced to address their budget problems by matching expenditures to tax receipts, or have they been given a lifeline by Washington to just keep spending more than they bring in?
Won't they just go right back into a deficit and have to lay these people off when those federal dollars are removed?
People like Krugman never have an answer for that.
Also of importance, do we know that these communities need more teachers, firefighters, and police officers? Has Krugman or anyone else advocating an increase in such hiring determined there's actually an inadequate number of these public employees in all localities around the country?
Let's understand that all because these numbers are down from shortly before the recession began, that doesn't mean they need be increased at this time. When it comes to public employees, hiring for hiring's sake just leads to budget deficits in the future.
But folks like Krugman don't care about that.
To them, debt isn't a problem, for we can always just print more money.
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— Noel Sheppard (@NoelSheppard) June 9, 2012
