EDITORIAL: Where the jobs are

Generally speaking, government at all levels — federal, state and local — doesn’t produce much of anything, depending instead on private-sector output to support its many endeavors. That’s why it’s dispiriting to see how decisively public-sector employment has left the manufacturing sector in a giant wake.

As reported by Terence P. Jeffrey of CNS News, government employees now outnumber manufacturing employees by 9,932,000, according to data released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Federal, state and local government employed 22,213,000 people in August, while the manufacturing sector employed 12,281,000.

And although Nevada is much more a service industry state, the numbers here are still staggering, with nearly three times more government workers in the Silver State than in manufacturing. Through July, the BLS reported that Nevada has almost 154,000 government employees, compared with 42,400 in the manufacturing sector.

It didn’t used to be this way. For decades, there were far greater numbers of those who actually made things that people needed or wanted than those whose sole existence depended on the taxpaying public. In 1939, manufacturing accounted for about 9 million jobs, while government was closer to 4 million. Manufacturing peaked in 1979 at 19.5 million, but by then, government was growing at a precipitous rate, not far behind at about 15 million employees.

Ten years later, we reached the tipping point, and it’s gotten worse ever since. Mr. Jeffrey noted that in August 1989, manufacturing employed 17.96 million, while government employed 17.98 million. Manufacturing has lost almost 6 million jobs since then, while government has added more than 4 million.

Jazz Shaw of HotAir.com gets to the crux of the matter: Government is “a necessary function in a democratic republic and you need people to keep it running, but it’s not really contributing anything to the general productivity of the nation. In fact, too much of government’s role is to actually retard productivity in the private sector courtesy of our endless chain of regulatory agencies.”

Precisely. If you’re looking to explain why manufacturing employment in America is closer to where it was in 1939 than at its peak, technology and outsourcing are obvious answers. But a bloated government cannot be overlooked.

Until our elected officials recognize that the ever-expanding regulatory state inhibits real economic progress in manufacturing or any other sector, the paltry numbers we’ve seen in the wake of the Great Recession will continue.