JOBS, JOBS… Oh

Republican States Cut Most Public Sector Jobs In 2011

while Republicans are trying to credit their small government ideology with bolstering the current economic recovery, a new study from The Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal and Bryce Covert found that those public sector losses have hit hardest and most often in states where Republicans took control of state legislatures during the 2010 mid-term elections. In 2011, newly-Republican states accounted for 40 percent of the public sector layoffs while cutting government jobs at rates that far outpace the national average:

The 11 states that the Republicans took over in 2010 laid off, on average, 2.5 percent of their government workforces in a single year. This is compared to the overall average of 0.5 percent for the rest of the states. […] [T]hese 11 states as a whole account for a total of 87,000 jobs lost, reflecting around 40.5 percent of the total.