August 7, 2012 by David K. Sutton
Big government? Try again. Smallest public sector since 1968
Courtesy of Jordan Weissman at the Atlantic and the Hamilton Project (a centrist think tank), we have the following graph that shows the ratio of government employment to population since 1980:
The takeaway? President Obama is presiding over the smallest government (federal, state and local) in over 30 years. More on that in a moment. If you want big government, go find George W. Bush and ask him about it, as the highest sustained government employment occurred during his first term. The biggest reason for the big drop in public sector workers? The Great Recession. Over 600,000 government jobs have been lost – A statistic I swear not one conservative is aware of.
Next we have this graph, which shows we actually have the lowest amount of government workers to civilian population, not in 30 years, but over 40 years (1968):
So as usual, conservative big government rhetoric is bunk.
