So much for our supposed big-government Keynesian president: government jobs, the emblem of New Deal anti-depression policy, have actually gotten more and more scarce since President Obama took office. Since the recovery began in June 2009, the number of public-sector jobs has shrunk by almost 3%.
Most of that reduction has been at the state and local level, but it’s striking that the decline has been fairly continuous despite the $787 billion two-year federal stimulus package in 2009-2011. As I’ve noted before, the stimulus bill took pains to ensure that nearly all of that temporary job creation would be for private contractors. And as I’ve lamented before, it’s rather hard to have effective fiscal policies when our current politics demonizes direct government job creation (i.e., giving people government jobs) as worse than doing nothing. This is all the more remarkable considering that direct job creation was the calling card of the most popular president of the last century, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal programs created an average of three million government jobs per year in 1933-1940. One could even argue that the political success of those programs was a big part of the reason why conservatives oppose them so fiercely, at least whenever they’re contemplated by Democrats.
What’s also striking is that this pattern is in contrast to all three of the previous recessions (1981, 1990, 2001), when public-sector employment actually grew. Notably, all three of those past recessions were under Republican presidents — maybe it’s a “Nixon goes to China” phenomenon, where only conservative-seeming Republicans can get away with increasing government employment. (Then again, it’s possible that most of the action was at the state and local level, though I’d suspect that the 1980s military buildup accounted for much of the increase under President Reagan.) Most striking of all is that the ultimate Keynesian here was Ronald Reagan, who oversaw an increase of almost 4% in government jobs in the first 30 months of recovery, the most of any of these presidents. Graph from Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan):
Blogging Through the Wreckage 