Posted on 01/06/2010 10:12:04 AM PST by FromLori
n the just-so story of the evolution of our economy, our old manufacturing based economy has been replaced by an innovative knowledge economy. That's not quite true.
In fact, the decline of the jobs in goods producing sectors of the economy--construction, manufacturing, mining and agriculture--has largely been met with an increase in jobs on the government payroll. We've gone from providing jobs in profit-making private industry to providing jobs in profit-eating government work. Toward the end of 2007, the total number of government jobs exceeded the total number of goods producing jobs. Welcome to the government payroll economy.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
ping
This is way oversimplified and overblown.
Please explain more. Thanks.
The chart reflects the growth of government but the other factor is labor saving productivity gains are much easier in manufacturing than the service type jobs that dominate the gov’t work force. It takes a lot less labor to produce a ton of steel than say in 1960. Also, given technology and trade patterns US manufacturing has shifted away from labor intensive industries, for example, textiles to more capital/technology intensive industries, say CPU chip manufacturing.
I think its an excellent representation of a “welfare” state.
Then the revenues fall and the government workers don’t get paid....
I believe this is just manufacturing jobs so service jobs are not factored in.
Last job I had at a major oil company I worked at was with a department that was involved in coal liquefaction. We were partnered with a Japanese group and a German group and also the Department of Energy. Every single memo, report, letter, etc. that I and other secretaries produced had to be copied umpteen times for all involved. I'm talking at least 100 copies.
I found a comic in the Sunday paper one weekend at that time that described precisely the way the government worked. The first screen were the characters marching along a path, then they get to a chasm. One asks how are we supposed to get over this? Another suggests they ask the government. The last screen is the marchers crossing the chasm on stacks of paper.
I don't know what comic it was in but it was jaw-dropping appropriate.
I don’t find the comparison between “good-producing” jobs and government jobs as an essential metric. However, it is of profound concern that, while the population has grown by a factor of 2.5x between 1939 and today, government employment has grown by a factor greater than 6x.
The standing joke at the Kennedy Space Center when I worked there was NASA couldn’t launch the Space Shuttle until the paperwork weighed as much as the vehicle.
Parasites just keep on sucking blood from working people that make the system go. Keep this up for much longer and soon there will be no working blood left. What will the parasites do then?
Truth be told WE ALL WORK FOR THE GUBMINT!!!
We just pay the bustards half of what we earn at our day job - to not sit in one of those marble mausoleums and pretend to perform some useless, non-productive task, otherwise known as Federal employment.
We pay other fees to the IRS so countless layabouts can sit at home, eating too much and watching the MSM tell them how to vote.
More appropriate was a real story in Hawaii involving a broken road. Locals fixed in a few days, took the government two years to get around to dealing with it, so to speak.
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