Is our government really too big?

When I checked my mail today, there was a piece of paper from one of the guys running for representative of my district in it. It didn't have much on it, but there was enough for me to go to his website to see what exactly his stance is on issues. On his site I found an article he had written for a local paper as a guest writer, and in this article I found a claim that government employment was higher than manufacturing employment in my state and since my state is pretty big on manufacturing I decided to check it out and see if he was right. He was. Then I checked nationwide.

36,183,515 people worked for the state and local governments nationwide in 2009.
2,000,000 people worked for the federal government in 2008. (2009 figures were not available)
2,135,790 people worked in manufacturing nationwide in May 2009.

38.2 million people work for the government in one capacity or another. Let that number sink in a bit. Even the industry with the highest employment levels, Retail Salespersons, didn't come close to government employment with 4,209,500 employees.

I can hear you thinking "But Jenna, we're in the middle of a recession. It's not fair to compare the employment levels now." Yep, I thought of that too. So I went back to 2005, well before the recession began, for a comparison.

In 2005, 10,249,220 people worked in production/manufacturing and 4,344,770 people worked as Retail Salespersons. Meanwhile, 18,644,112 people worked for the federal, state, and local governments in some capacity during the same year. (Number found by adding totals of full-time State and Local with total Federal employees.) We went from 18.6 million government employees to 38.2 million in three years. The size of our government more than doubled.

To give you an even better idea of how much our government has grown I even went back to 2000. A decade ago there were 15,077,703 people working in State and Local government and 2,899,363 people working in Federal government. That's 17,977,066 people compared to 38.2 million in 2008. What was once a rather steady number with less than a million more people employed over five years exploded between 2005 and 2008. To discover why, you need look no further than the laws Congress has passed.

Protect America Act of 2007
Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007
Energy Independence and Security Act
America COMPETES Act
The stimulus bills, the health care bill, TARP, etc.

When you hear people say they want a smaller government, this is what they're talking about. The problem is not that the federal government has gotten too big employment-wise, it's that state and local governments have grown exponentially due to all the laws and spending of the federal government. All of the laws I listed above, and all the ones I didn't, required more people be hired to supervise, administrate, study the effects of, and enforce the new laws. With every new law Congress passes, the size of our government grows because it has to in order to carry out those new laws.

So to answer my own question, yes the government really has gotten too big. Not in the way many people think it has, but there it is.

reply to post by Jenna


you know anyway i look at this its a lose lose situation.

you work for the government your getting paid by taxpayer money then paying back that government to keep your job the problem is the government has become too big and is continually spending more than it takes in.

i look it at like if the government was a public or private corporation it would have been bankrupted long ago but then the corporations have the useful tools called bean counters those people who go around and trim the fat and waste out of the company which is something the government while may have in name does not have in actions.

this is the part of makes it a lose lose if you go out in the private sector the individual is still at the whims of the government and with all the taxation and regulations and the unionization that goes on in this country it has essenstially destroyed the majority of all manufactuing in this country and yes unions numbers are down and union revenues are up that is the reason.

there is no future in government jobs and the day comming that people are going to have to pay the piper.
there is no future in public sector for the simple fact there is too much governmental interference.

basically in all reality this country has no future because people have become to greedy and to selfish and are too blinded by their own ambitions.


dunno if that was really on topic just woke up and it was a thought passing through this stupid persons head as i have been so often called on ats- good day

and yes the government really is to big

Originally posted by Jenna

Thanks Jenna -

I think I am missing some figures

I am not sure where you got this


36,183,515 people worked for the state and local governments nationwide in 2009.

Or better yet I am trying to see what has changed as opposed to 2000

Pretty amazing

Jenna - you have your math wrong -

state and local government grew by 1.5 million in the last decade



2000

FTE 15,077,703

2009

FTE 16,627,330

What has increased is the pay - (no stagnation there)

Thanks

reply to post by Jenna


Very informative thread Jenna. Thanks for posting this stuff and putting this into some perspective

I know I repeat this often, but I'm nearly 40 and I am beginning to believe that I may never know how many laws there are, nor what they are, or even what they mean when simultaneously held in context to one another. If we don't live long enough to learn the rules to the game, then how do we know how to play fair, I often wonder. This too could be a sign of a government that is too big.

Nice Post, and I appreciate the thread Jenna, thanks.

-ET

Something seems to be VERY wrong with those numbers.

Divide the total pay by the total workers. What do YOU come up with.

I come up with only 4326.13!?

64 billion / 14 million is what?

Should we add another zero onto that 64 billion?

That would be 640 BILLION! Almost as much as the Military budget!

I see the end column says total march pay?

What is going on with that chart?

Originally posted by saltheart foamfollower
I may have made an error.

edit on 25-9-2010 by saltheart foamfollower because: (no reason given)

It's Full Time Equivalent

There about a 1.5 million increase in FTE which is the operative number

reply to post by Janky Red


I get that, I just used the first two without the part time, with the part time the pay is-4182

So this has to be per month.

So for a year, the payroll is costing what-$834,468,589,020

Hmmm, I wonder what the pensions are costing per year? How bout their medical, dental etc etc etc.

These numbers seem to be kinda wrong. They are either a monthly component or something is wrong in denmark.

Also, these numbers are only base numbers. They are all estimated. Not actual.


edit to add more info-

From here-federaljobs.net...

Are you considering a government job? The federal government employs approximately 2 million federal workers plus 700,000 Postal workers and hires hundreds of thousands each year to replace civil service workers that transfer to other federal government jobs, retire, or leave for other reasons. Average annual salary for full-time federal government jobs now exceeds $79,197.

The U.S. Government is the largest employer in the United States, hiring about 2.0 percent of the nation's work force and the workforce is expanding significantly due to health care reform, in-sourcing, and many new regulatory programs. Federal government jobs can be found in every state and large metropolitan area, including overseas in over 200 countries. The average annual federal workers compensation, including pay plus benefits, now exceeds $119,982

So, let us say 2.9 million times 120k equals 348,000,000,000

So add this onto the previous amount- $1.182 TRILLION in wages and standard benefits, not pensions.

So add say 500 billion for pensions. $1.682 TRILLION per year for government workers. That should be a low figure. NOW, who was saying the government is NOT big enough?

Very well done Jenna.

I would add that 70% of our military budget goes to aid in the defense of the rest of the world. The EU has not had to truly build an army because of American military hardware present since WW2, and that is set to grow as well. When Americans look favorably at the EU social programs they fail to realize that it is possible by not having to maintain large armies. We pick up whatever they don't cover. And that's just one example. The Middle East, Asia, South America, Australia....One of the biggest chunks of our bloated government stems from foreign policy. So much money leaves this country at the stroke of a pen, much of it under covert action-never to be heard from again.

Our government is so big it has a footprint on every part of the world.

reply to post by Janky Red


I added the total full-time, part-time, and full-time equivalent figures to reach the total. Once you add all three together it's much larger than just the full-time only which is what it appears you used in your second post.

Edit: Ahh, I see what you're saying now. The problem is that my source didn't give figures for full-time and part-time employees back in 2005. It only provided them for the FTE employees. I'll do some looking and see if I can find some more complete numbers somewhere.


Edit 2:
Ok, I found more complete numbers by using the Census' build-a-table function but I had to go to 2002 because 2005 wasn't an option. Why they didn't include all the numbers to begin with, I don't know. It doesn't give a persistent link without my downloading it as a pdf or excel table either, so I can't link to it.

There were 15,710,050 full-time employees, 4,545,290 part-time employees, and 13,918,573 full-time equivalent employees for a grand total of 34,173,913 state and local employees in 2002. While not as massive of a jump as I initially thought, it's still an increase of 2,009,602 to reach it's current level and I still have to wonder why we need that many people working as government employees.

Thanks for pointing the missing numbers out to me Janky, I missed it when I was writing up the OP.

It's not too big, it's too corrupt.

reply to post by Jenna


That's what happens in communism, state control of everything requires large numbers of employees.

second

Originally posted by projectvxn
Very well done Jenna.

I would add that 70% of our military budget goes to aid in the defense of the rest of the world. The EU has not had to truly build an army because of American military hardware present since WW2, and that is set to grow as well. When Americans look favorably at the EU social programs they fail to realize that it is possible by not having to maintain large armies. We pick up whatever they don't cover. And that's just one example. The Middle East, Asia, South America, Australia....One of the biggest chunks of our bloated government stems from foreign policy. So much money leaves this country at the stroke of a pen, much of it under covert action-never to be heard from again.

Our government is so big it has a footprint on every part of the world.

Sorry, the US doesn't have bases to help others, it does that to help itself, to have control.

With out the Zionist controlled US and the US funded Zionist thug state, and without industrial-military coca cola capitalism, many people would be much happier.

I'm not seeing the issue here? Am I supposed to be upset or angry?

So the government employs what 40 million? That's about 13% of the population is employed to the US government in some form. Is the government not the singles largest entity in the nation, that's like having Wal-Mart as the equivalent of the government but remaining a private business, I doubt I would be hearing this argument.

The government is a monopoly, that's quite obvious. But government is meant to be the only monopoly in a nation. So to compare the employment of the government to any other single private employer is insanity unless you are promoting business monopolization. I don't think 13% of our population being employed by the governing body is something to be hysterical about.

We cannot forget that this includes teachers, police, firefighters, garbage men/women, water treatment centers, wildlife and land preserves, border patrol and many other jobs. The point you are trying to make is that the government is now a massive bureaucracy of just bureaucrats, that trick may work on other people but it doesn't work on me.

reply to post by Jenna


So I went over your numbers again and this is completely neutral, the facts are as follows.

www2.census.gov...

According to the census website there are:

14,817,399 - - Full time employees
4,738,786 - - Part Time employees
16,627,330 - - Full Time Equivalent employment


This means that there are exactly 19,556,185 Federal Employees.

You accidentally included Full Time Equivalent, what that means is

In the U.S. federal government, FTE is defined by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) as the number of total hours worked divided by the maximum number of compensable hours in a work year as defined by law. For example, if the work year is defined as 2,080 hours, then one worker occupying a paid full time job all year would consume one FTE. Two employees working for 1,040 hours each would consume one FTE between the two of them.

en.wikipedia.org...


So that means that means approximately 6.30% of US population works for the government whether it is full time or part time.

en.wikipedia.org...

US population = 310,338,000
Gov. Emploee = 19,556,185

Also here's some more information, the average yearly income is approxamitely $50,186.

reply to post by Misoir



Ya, I have come to the same conclusion

Full-time equivalent (FTE) is a way to measure a worker's involvement in a project, or a student's enrollment at an educational institution. An FTE of 1.0 means that the person is equivalent to a full-time worker, while an FTE of 0.5 signals that the worker is only half-time.

en.wikipedia.org...

Thanks

Thx for the post, makes an impact seeing the #'s in black and white. Honestly though with the amount of newstories breaking most everyday, ie; no digging on florida beaches, Dept. Of MMS confiscating private property...you don't ned the numbers to see our government is out of control. Way To Big... To Big To Fail hah


Posted Via ATS Mobile: m.abovetopsecret.com

reply to post by wcitizen


Now that's not really the point is it? I'm not saying the US overseas military presence is benevolent, at one point it may have been, today it is far from it. It is also one of the largest components of our out of control government spending.