Where’s The Jobs Program
I knew things were bad but this Digby post shows how bad:
The December jobs figures out today indicate that there were 725,000 more jobs in the private sector than at the end of 2008 — and 697,000 fewer government jobs. That works into a private-sector gain of 0.6 percent, and a government sector decline of 3.1 percent.
In total, the number of people with jobs is up by 28,000, or 0.02 percent.
There are around 150,000 people per month added to the work force, and we have been adding an average of less that 600 jobs per month.
I knew governments were laying people off, but I didn’t really appreciate the size of the lay offs. The standard economic reporting on jobs is always limited to the numbers for non-farm jobs, and never addresses the changes in the public sector.
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And the horrific thing is that a number of the jobs cut were in public safety — fire and police — because those are the big budget items in a typical city budget. Here in San Jose we recently had an apartment manager and his maintenance manager confront and shoot a suspected burglar who might have had nothing to do with the actual burglary, he may have just had the bad luck to be driving a white van like the actual burglar and park in their parking lot. But the deal is that the San Jose PD doesn’t even take reports on burglaries anymore — they don’t have the manpower anymore, the city is three times the size that it was in the 1970’s but they have been cut so badly that they have the same manpower as in the 1970’s. This is not going to turn out well, because when rule of law fails, the alternative is rule of gun — and rule of gun never ends up being an improvement.
Public safety and the schools get cut this round, because everything else has already been cut.
We just voted for a millage increase for our fire department because there are empty properties in town, and sooner or later one of them will be set on fire by the homeless starting a fire to combat the cold.
If you have a problem during the 40 hours that the Deputy that the town pays for is on duty, response is great, but the rest of the time you are in for a wait. So far they have been doing the cutting by a hiring freeze, but if things don’t start improving at a faster pace we are going to end up with the ‘hue and cry’ replacing the Sheriff’s Department. That will thrill the teapartiers, as it will be a return to the militia system.