Charts comparing how the public and private sectors have done under Obama:
'
Here's What's Really Happened To The Private Sector Under Obama'
The public sector part of that page is particularly deceptive. A lot of those charts only go back to 2009, masking prior increases in government, even though most of those private sector graphs went back much further. It's not like the data wasn't there either, the author cut off prior data to hide what's going on. That's warning bell #1 that the author isn't interested in the truth, but an agenda.
By that page's own admission,
federal worker employment has actually been increasing, and that's what Obama has direct control over. State worker employment has dropped because a lot of states dug themselves into financial holes through profligate and unsustainable spending. State government
growth is at a low, but note what is NOT shown: the
size of state government, particularly in relation to the rest of the economy. If state government has grown to much in the past, then right now it
should be at a minimum. Even more damning, though, is that state budgets were in fact increasing even as state employment dropped. Obviously somebody is doing something wrong in state government.
Other graphs are essentially meaningless. School construction, for example: the graph alone cannot tell us whether the drop is a good thing or a bad thing. We shouldn't be building schools we don't need, or spending more than we need to on the schools we do need. How much do we need? I have no idea, and I doubt anyone else here does either. The author certainly gives no indication, and I suspect he doesn't know either. As for other spending collapses (like roads and public safety), well, what the hell was the stimulus
for, then? Wasn't it
supposed to be for exactly that sort of thing? Evidently not, because that's not where the money ended up. If we accept the premise that these are the things the government needs to keep up spending on, then Obama's policies are demonstrably a failure.
Oh, and on the private sector job front, adding jobs isn't enough: the population keeps growing, so you can lose ground even while adding jobs. We haven't actually been making real progress on that front.
