RUSH: Steve Moore had a great piece recently in the Wall Street Journal talking about the numbers of people working in government versus the private sector, the number of people being hired. It is devastating. It explains so much. Food stamp participation is at an all-time high.
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Here’s the Stephen Moore fact: “Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government than in all of manufacturing.” So what this is, the takers, which we’ve been talking about, are on parade. Twenty-two and a half million people work for government. They don’t make anything. They’re just being paid by virtue of transfers of wealth, redistribution of wealth. Government workers are paid from the income taxes and other taxes paid by Americans.
So 22.5 million people working for government, that’s twice as many as work in manufacturing, which is 11.5 million. This is almost an exact reversal of what it was in 1960. There were 15 million workers in manufacturing, 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government. And therefore we have become a nation of takers, not makers. More Americans work for the government than in manufacturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining, and utilities combined.
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RUSH: Stephen Moore in the Wall Street Journal, this was on April 1st. “If you want to understand better why so many states — from New York to Wisconsin to California — are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government. It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?
“Every state in America today except for two — Indiana and Wisconsin — has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees — twice as many as people as work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida’s ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York’s. Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things. The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker.” And remember, now, a vast majority of these people are union, which means the vast majority of their dues goes to the Democrat Party, which is one of the reasons state payrolls are swelling as they are. It’s a money laundering operation for the Democrat Party.
Mr. Moore writes, “Now it is certainly true that many states have not typically been home to traditional manufacturing operations. Iowa and Nebraska are farm states, for example. But in those states, there are at least five times more government workers than farmers. West Virginia is the mining capital of the world, yet it has at least three times more government workers than miners. New York is the financial capital of the world — at least for now. That sector employs roughly 670,000 New Yorkers. That’s less than half of the state’s 1.48 million government employees. Don’t expect a reversal of this trend anytime soon. Surveys of college graduates are finding that more and more of our top minds want to work for the government. Why? Because in recent years only government agencies have been hiring, and because the offer of near lifetime security is highly valued in these times of economic turbulence. When 23-year-olds aren’t willing to take career risks, we have a real problem on our hands. Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
“The employment trends described here are explained in part by hugely beneficial productivity improvements in such traditional industries as farming, manufacturing, financial services and telecommunications. These produce far more output per worker than in the past. The typical farmer, for example, is today at least three times more productive than in 1950.”
So my question, ladies and gentlemen, is when can we start shipping some of these government jobs overseas?
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