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Obama Shrinks Government Payrolls; Bush Expanded Them

Mitt Romney's trip last week to the Ohio drywall factory that closed during the Bush Administration speaks volumes about the GOP's disconnect from economic reality. Romney and the Tea Party (there's an odd couple) need you to believe that President Barack Obama is killing jobs by expanding the government.

Actually, President Obama is killing jobs... by shrinking government:

Comparison of Public- and Private-Sector Job Growth Under Obama and Bush, first terms

Compare President Obama's first term to President Bush's, and you see a phenomenon we've discussed previously: Contrary to crazy cries of creeping socialism, President Obama has overseen a steady decrease of folks working for the government, with the predictable exception of the Census hiring spike. The Obama decrease in public payrolls is so far almost 3%. At this point in President George W. Bush's first term, we had seen an increase in government of over 3%.

Meanwhile, in the private sector, President Obama has been gaining ground on private-sector job losses. As of February, the net private-sector job losses under President Obama stood at 274,000. At the same time in President Bush's first term, the private sector had lost ten times as many jobs, 2.7 million, since inauguration.

If President Obama had simply behaved like that socialist President Bush and raided the private sector to hire lots more government workers, President Obama could right now brag of a net increase in jobs under his administration. Let's see Mitt Romney drop by a closed Extension office and campaign on that issue.

13 Comments

  1. larry kurtz 2012.04.23

    Georgia Pacific is a manufacturer of drywall compounds and a serial polluter: it a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries.

    Only you can reverse red state collapse.

  2. Steve Sibson 2012.04.23

    Yes Cory, Bush is a socialist and so is Romney and so is Obama. It is getting tiring to watch kettles calling pots black.

  3. Carter 2012.04.23

    Anyone who isn't a Socialist, Steve?

  4. Steve Sibson 2012.04.23

    "Anyone who isn’t a Socialist, Steve?"

    They are called conservatives.

  5. Jana 2012.04.23

    Without going down a rabbit hole, Steve, you called our Governor Daugaard a socialist today.

    You must have a really small club.

  6. Carter 2012.04.23

    That's kind of what I was getting at, Jana. Please, name names, Steve.

  7. caheidelberger Post author | 2012.04.23

    Nope, Larry: it's just time for us all to recognize that socialism is a tolerable and to some extent necessary element of any social order. Anarcho-capitalism doesn't work.

  8. larry kurtz 2012.04.24

    I'm not convinced that We, the People wouldn't inscribe socialism as the law of the land at a constitutional convention, Cory: ip.

  9. Steve Sibson 2012.04.24

    "Anarcho-capitalism doesn’t work."

    So who advocates that? Again, the simple minded dichotomy mindset that there can be only total government or no government.

  10. larry kurtz 2012.04.25

    "About 3.3 million more Americans are working today than were just two years ago." Motley Fool.

Comments are closed.