Tea Party Now Covering News for Washington Post
Is that really “not down by much”? Given that some growth is required every year merely to keep pace with higher costs and a growing population, a cut in unadjusted dollar terms over three years is actually a lot. Government spending has actually dropped by 2 percentage points of gross domestic product since 2010. That’s a very fast drop, especially given the backdrop of an economy coping with the vast fallout from the largest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Indeed, the consensus of the macroeconomic forecasting field is that rapid government cutbacks are hampering the recovery, and thus prolonging the enormous human misery of high unemployment, though that consensus does not appear anywhere in the story.
The story proceeds to report that the federal workforce is not shrinking by much:
Measured another way — not in dollars, but in people — the government has about 4.1 million employees today, military and civilian. That’s more than the populations of 24 states.
Back in 2010, it had 4.3 million employees. More than the populations of 24 states.
Another way to put that fact would be that the federal workforce has declined by 4.65 percent over three years. Still another way to put it would be that, over the last several years, the federal workforce as a percentage of the population has continued its historic decline:
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