Well, it does. Even the Wall Street Journal says so.
Wall Street Journal reporter Justin Lahart crunched the numbers last week. He found the U.S. unemployment rate would be 7.1 percent instead of 8.1 percent if government hadn't cut spending so drastically since the 2008 financial crisis.
Lahart writes that the household survey on which the unemployment rate is based shows a staggering drop in government employment:
...the magnitude of the drop is striking: It marks the largest decline on both an absolute and a percentage basis on record going back to 1948.The National Memo points out this debunks the myth that government spending is exploding:
The truth is that federal, state and local governments have cut more than 750,000 jobs since June of 2009...
The total number of people employed by the government is down 950,000 since the recovery began in June of 2009. This number will only get worse as the federal government, with the sequester cuts, joins in on the austerity that’s being implemented on state and local levels, where budgets must be balanced by law.Cutbacks in government spending also explain why Wisconsin is so terribly behind the rest of the country in job creation. Cognitive Dissidence reports:
To say that the Scott Walker's austerity plan is not working would be an understatement of epic proportions... not only did Walker lead us straight to the bottom, we are the only state in the region to have an overall job loss!...Read the whole thing here.
