Dick Tuck
Board Troll
- Aug 29, 2009
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And the right wing wants to blame Obama for this?
America's Hidden Austerity Program - NYTimes.com
America's Hidden Austerity Program - NYTimes.com
But there is something historically different about this recession and its aftermath: in the past, local government employment has been almost recession-proof. This time its not. Going back as long as the data have been collected (1955), with the one exception of the 1981 recession, local government employment continued to grow almost every month regardless of what the economy threw at it. But since the latest recession began, local government employment has fallen by 3 percent, and is still falling. In the equivalent period following the 1990 and 2001 recessions, local government employment grew 7.7 and 5.2 percent. Even following the 1981 recession, by this stage local government employment was up by 1.4 percent.