Job Numbers: ‘Not as Bad as We Thought’ Is the New Normal

With the increasingly blockheaded Eric Cantor worrying about the “mobs” on Wall Street that he says are “pitting Americans against Americans,” it’s helpful to remember that his party spends a great deal of time pitting the Americans in the public sector against the Americans in the private sector for the purposes of protecting the people in the wealthiest sector. Increasingly, public-sector jobs are framed as being less legitimate, even though the effect on the general economy of someone who works in the Department of Environmental Affairs is exactly the same as someone who works at, say, Wal-Mart. Both of them spend money. Both of them buy goods. Both of them become better and more productive citizens because they draw paychecks. If you cut tens of thousands of government jobs, you are still cutting, you know, jobs. You are acting in a way that depresses the economy, just as if the plant in town closes and all the jobs go to China, while everybody who used to work the assembly line waits outside the unemployment office for hours because the staff in there has been cut to the bone because the Republican governor of the state has decided that the way to deal with unemployment is to throw the people who work for him out of their jobs. The political utility of dividing government work from “actual work” is belied by the facts on the ground, which are that the economy is still not producing enough private-sector jobs to keep up with unemployment, and that “not as bad as we thought it was going to be” apparently is the new normal.

Charles P. Pierce