Speaking of government employees, what’s wrong with this picture?

Over the past two years, while the government hiring has grown like weeds, manufacturing employment actually fell. Not all government workers are paper pushers by any means. But when the feds are losing $2 trillion, do we really need more Americans on the government payrolls? Remember, it is private workers who pay the salaries of public workers.

We did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation. What if private-sector hiring had kept pace with government over the past two years? The chart below shows we would have almost 3 million more workers in the productive sector of the economy. That’s called crowding out.