RightChange: Private Sector Jobs Down 4.6 Million, Federal Jobs Up 11.4% Under Obama

The media is still abuzz about Obama’s impromptu presser Friday where he uttered the now famous words, “the private sector is doing fine.” Perhaps the utter ridiculousness of that sentence was a major distraction to what he said after that. After Obama said the private sector was not the economy that was ailing, he blamed it on cuts in federal spending for state governments:

"Where we're seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government, oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don't have the same kind of flexibility of the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in."

The guys at Investor’s Business Daily crunched the numbers and it’s easy to see that what Obama said is just simply not accurate. According to data from the Labor Department, private sector jobs are down 4.6 million (4%) from January 2008 versus government jobs that are down 407,000 (1.8%). Federal employment is actually 250,000 jobs above the January 2008 level. That’s an 11.4% increase! See chart courtesy of IBD below:

It is true that the private sector payrolls have been adding jobs each month while the government has been cutting jobs, but IBD notes that it is because governments did not immediately cut jobs. The recession was also a great time for federal employment – after all, that was the sector that was rewarded by the Stimulus program. Excluding the 2010 Census hiring surge, federal jobs rose until March 2011. Stimulus hiring merely delayed the layoffs for state and local governments and did barely anything but leave taxpayers on the hook for Obama’s energy loan bankruptcies.

Payroll change since January 2008

Total: -5.01 million  -3.6%

Private: -4.61 million  -4%

Government: -407,000  -1.8%

Federal Government: (excluding post office) +225,000 , 11.4%

Sorry Mr. Obama, but the numbers don’t lie. The only sector of our economy that is arguably “doing fine” is the government sector that has ballooned under President Obama. Thought to ponder: when will it be considered politically correct to say that Obama literally makes up the data he uses in his speeches?

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