[expat_panama]

...State and local payrolls have been very hard hit the last 6 years...

That may not be a given.  Another way of looking at it is that we're seeing more of a corrective 'downsizing'---

--like how we see in the private sector with productivity rising with a recession.  What I'm saying is rather than being 'very hard hit', that gov't payrolls can also be seen as resetting to more appropriate levels.

must be federal employees only.

That may be true; problem is that iirc it includes overseas military as well as stateside civilian, that plus one's from Census Bur. data and the fed graph uses BLS numbers.

[Wyatt's Torch]

Oh I don’t disagree that it was needed. But people can;t have it both ways. They can’t complain about the slow job growth when it is being impacted by declines in government employees. Also on NFP days you will see people say that the job growth is “all government” when that is factually false. People here are their own worst enemies because they refuse to be informed.

[Lurkina.n.Learnin]

And then there is this

U.S. Regulatory Costs Are Now Bigger Than Canada’s Entire Economy
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3149885/posts