[Wyatt's Torch]

Oh I don’t disagree that it was needed. But people can;t have it both ways. They can’t complain about the slow job growth when it is being impacted by declines in government employees. Also on NFP days you will see people say that the job growth is “all government” when that is factually false. People here are their own worst enemies because they refuse to be informed.

[expat_panama]

can’t complain about the slow job growth when it is being impacted by declines in government employees

Sure they can --and they do it all the time.  OK, we're talking about justified complaints.  Seriously, there's reason to consider that the impact of gov't payroll declines can actually increase job growth.  The thing is that since Jan. '08 we've had a negative correlation between gov't payrolls and total employment--

--so whether or not we're seeing a causal relationship here, we can pretty much accept that boosting gov't payrolls has not measurably helped total employment levels and cutting gov't payrolls hasn't seemed to hurt..