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Bill USA

(6,436 posts)
Mon Apr 28, 2014, 06:03 PM Apr 2014

How The Government (Job Cuts) Killed The Middle Class, In 1 Chart

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/28/government-jobs-recovery_n_5226029.html?ref=topbar
(emphases my own)

Politicians at all levels of government claim they want to help the middle class, but few things lately have hurt the middle class more than government.

Government layoffs, specifically, have carved a deep gouge in middle-class hiring in the years since the Great Recession, as a new report by the National Employment Law Project, a think tank focused on helping low-wage workers, shows. In the chart below, you can see that federal, state and local governments have been the biggest -- and just about the only -- industries that have cut jobs in the past four years.

employment change



This is the direct result of the austerity obsession Republican politicians mysteriously developed after the inauguration of President Obama in the middle of the financial crisis in 2009. They pushed to slash government spending, leading to job cuts at all levels of government -- exactly the wrong thing to do in the wake of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Austerity crimped access to the decent-paying, middle-class jobs that are typical of government work. As NELP notes, many of the jobs lost were replaced by low-wage jobs. Middle-wage jobs accounted for 37 percent of job losses and just 26 percent of job gains in the past four years, while low-wage jobs accounted for 22 percent of job losses and 44 percent of job gains, according to the NELP report.
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How The Government (Job Cuts) Killed The Middle Class, In 1 Chart (Original Post) Bill USA Apr 2014 OP
, blkmusclmachine Apr 2014 #1
I think we make too much of a distinction between 'public sector' and 'private sector' jobs LongTomH Apr 2014 #2

LongTomH

(8,636 posts)
2. I think we make too much of a distinction between 'public sector' and 'private sector' jobs
Tue Apr 29, 2014, 02:57 PM
Apr 2014

Public sector spending always attracts private sector investment. I saw that in the industry I retired from: The airline industry (Actually, I worked for a company that provided information services to the airlines.). The airlines benefit from public spending on air traffic control and safety services; they still receive, what amounts to subsidies, in the form of air mail and contracts to carry military personnel. That air mail subsidy kept the airlines going for the early years when aircraft passenger traffic wasn't enough to make them profitable.

How many other industries are highly dependent on government spending? Construction, building. The people providing electrical and HVAC services for government buildings work for private companies largely dependent on government contracts.

If nothing else, government employees with money to spend are a major factor in local economies across the nation; of course, they were more of a factor before the sequester and the craze for 'austerity' in all its forms.

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