Chicken littles are claiming that millions of jobs are going to be lost because of psuedo-budget “cuts” that may well start today. Check out this ridiculous claim. That’s par for the course for our elected officials, so what if they are off by orders of magnitude on the facts of issues they are supposedly “experts” on? Just a silly mistake of course.
Just how many people work for the federal government? About 3 million.
Just how much of a devastating slash is the sequester? Generously it is 2.5 percent of spending (of course, spending increases by almost double this amount every single year … we’re asking government to live like it did 6 months ago and they are finding it intolerable … what was that about greed?)
So, assuming that these “cuts” translate into direct federal government job losses, we’d expect to see 75,000 jobs lost in total. Aside from the fact that we should have 1/2 as many jobs in the federal government as we do, who is going to argue that the loss of 75,000 federal jobs is going to plunge us all into a recession? Are you serious? Are these 75,000 firees really producing things of such value that we will all be on FDR’s bread lines unless they keep “fighting the good fight?” And for the lords in DC, are they really going to fire the MOST valuable 75,000 workers if indeed this is what the sequester means?
Vomiting in my mouth now. And yes these are simple back of the envelope ideas. Put a multiplier of two on everything above and the point remains.
The problem, as I see it, isn’t that we’re cutting <2.5% of spending, but the fact that the cuts were designed to be unpalatable. Take the cuts to the military, for example– it's a 9% cut not just in total spending, but in every line item in the budget.* What we have is worse than politicians who are getting hysterical over modest cuts; we have politicians who've designed modest cuts worth getting hysterical over.
*See http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2013/02/sequestration_of_the_pentagon_budget_why_the_sequester_cuts_to_the_military.html
I guess your 3 million does not include DOD, right?
The figure sounds low, but let’s stipulate it as a given.
My back-of-the-envelope calculation for a well-managed operation, say, a Johnson & Johnson plant where a lot of waste had already wrung out, would be ten percent easy, almost blindfolded. That is 300,000 employees, plus the 270,000 that have been added just since 2009, plus an extra 30,000 additional for incidental slop equals 600,000.
The savings are not limited just to payroll, but are ten times that because many if not all spend their full time throwing sand in the gears of industry and commerce.
Moreover, if you include in those heads off payroll congressional staff, you can delay the completion of the regulations for Dodd-Frank until 2058, which Keynes described as the long run.