Posted on 09/15/2010 10:05:33 AM PDT by Nachum
According to Keynesian economists, government hiring stimulates the private sector during a recession because government employees go out and spend much of their paychecks in the private sector, and extra demand is exactly what the private sector needs during a recession. But this year’s experience with census hiring contradicts that view. Keynesians acknowledge that, someday, the private sector will pay taxes to finance the salaries and benefits of government employees, but this cost is said to be offset by the additional demand for goods and services produced in the private sector, which have those government employees as their customers.
(Excerpt) Read more at economix.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Productivity dropped for home businesses this year as entrepreneurs had to fend off census door-knockers.
Government jobs pay more and have better benefits than private sector jobs.
What incentive does that create?
Rather than acquire retirement wealth, those that do ‘public service’ work receive huge retirements that greatly exceed anything they might have acquired working for private companies.
Why doesn’t the government just buy a helicopter and drop money from the sky?
Exactly! There is census hiring every ten years, in good times and bad. So it ought to be possible to "tease out" the effect of census hiring on the economy by examining employment statistics during a dozen or so previous census periods. Why didn't he do that? |
“Why didn’t he do that?”
You asked a question you already answered.
“For an economics professor writing for The New York Times, this author was pretty lazy.”
“Keynesians acknowledge that, someday, the private sector will pay taxes to finance the salaries and benefits of government employees, but this cost is said to be offset by the additional demand for goods and services produced in the private sector, which have those government employees as their customers.”
OK. If we logically follow where this assertion takes us, an economy would be just hunky-dory if everyone worked for the government, and no one worked for the private sector. In fact, we’d all probably be better off because without the private sector there would be no useless private sector profits to be drained from the system, right?
I was a crew leader.
By the time we came by for the fourth or fifth time (even if they had sent in their form and/or filled one out for us) people were VERY stimulated!
I suspected my bosses were trying to cause an incident.
/frivolity
I suspect that the census’s (censii?) are not very comparable. I’d guesstimate that this cycle they hired more per-capita workers to make more visits, with more supervisors and training, more firings and then rehirings, to fill in more pages of more intrusive and ever more sensitive questions.
Havent they ever heard of vicious guard dogs and booby traps?
The Regime can't risk some accidentally blowing into white, conservative, capitalist hands.
no
Except in this case.
Census workers were paid very darn little (I’m making more now on unemployment than I was at the Census) and had NO benefits at all. No health coverage, no sick leave, no retirement.
Office clerks (what I mostly did) made 11 bucks an hour, which is a fair bit less than a similar job in private industry.The low pay vs the field workers was made up by our having full-time hours.
Enumerators (field workers) made 15 bucks, which is a decent wage, but most of them only worked a few hours a week for a few weeks, and were let go.
Crew leader assistants (my second post there) made the same as Enumerators, but had to be de facto crew leaders, and in their spare time (yeah, right) were to do enumeration. I had that position for a week, and was laid off.
Overtime was a non-issue, as it was basically forbidden. Work overtime (unless it was pre-approved. read:act of Congress)and you’re fired. First time.
The management at the Regional Census Centers did their best to stuff duties as far down the food chain as possible, because their chances for being kept on, promoted, getting a bonus, etc, depended on it. When you hear news about mis- or malfeasance at the Census, you can pretty much bet someone at the RCC was behind it.
It was not a bad job, all in all, and I worked with some of the best and smartest people I’ve ever worked with.
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For an economics professor writing for The New York Times, this author was pretty lazy. He says he's trying to figure out whether all the census hiring stimulated the economy. But then he fails to use the one method that would have worked, and which he knew was there: