That statement was made in response to an audience question on The Early Show, so he had no idea it was coming.
The questioner was a federal zoo employee about to be layed off
and the president obviously was winging it when he made that statement.

        That being said, there have in the last five years been substantial reductions in force in the federal government either thru outright RIFS or offers of early retirement. The Post Office cut 1400 low level jobs and 15% of its admin staff in recent years and offered early retirement to 150,000. That is just one agency.

      Your statistics do not necessarily disprove his statement as you are counting employees with jobs rather than employees who were riffed. If a person employed in the private sector moves to a government job, your number goes up without affecting the unemployment rate number. While conservatives are jumping all over Mr. Obama over this statement, the comentary I have seen like you looks at the employment number rather than the RIF rate.


    If you really want to figure out the number, check the weekly federal unemployment insurance claims data kept by the Dept. of Labor. Thousands of former fed workers are filing claims for unemployment insurance so it is reasonable to assume they lost their job non-voluntarily.  So Mr. Obama was certainly right that there have been layoffs that contribute to unemployment; whether "huge" is the correct adjective is open to question.

that are currently unemployed. The D of L data I linked you to does exactly that for both former federal and state employees. And that data shows he was right, depending on your definition of "huge."

    So your empirical data were facts but not facts that disproved his statement. My guess is that he was referring to the D of L unemployed former government workers data when he made that statement.

      And to suggest he was "lying" when he gave to an answer to an audience question is what is absurd, as you well know, so that part of your post is entirely unsupportable. You try taking on questions on all topics about the economy on live TV and see how many you miss.
     
      So clueless or lying? Wrong on both counts. I'll give you "exaggerated."

guess that the total employment for Federal workers dramatically increased from 2008 through 2011. I'm also going to guess that the number of state and local employees decreased due to budget cuts. Why am I guessing? Because I can't find a decent site that shows a year over year comparison using a standard naming convention for jobs.

Why do I believe the federal roles increased? Anytime you increase a federal budget from $2.8T in 2008 to $3.8T in 2011, the increase is generally going to be in labor. Yeah, there has been layoffs, but at the same time increases in other departments and functions.

There is a lot of low hanging fruit you can cut, i.e. post office. They make up 20% of the federal employee roll. They keep talking about a 5 day or 4 day service, plus office consolidation, but it hasn't happened, and I doubt it will. You and I can walk through just about every federal, state and local dept (excluding things like first responders) and whack every 10th employee, and we wouldn't miss a heartbeat. But then you are going to add 2M to the unemployment rolls. But it would be a fun exercise.

Last thing. Why didn't you sell CISCO right before earnings? Did I not say it was only a trade? They disappointed again, just like Microsoft.

That cost me about $850 dollars in one day.

     Plus did you see Mark Hanes' interview with Chambers? He asked him the obvious question of "since you are reversing management decisions you made in 2009, didn't you make a mistake?"

       Rather than say "yes" Chambers went off on a tangent about how sucessful CISCO had been in other areas.

     But what about Goldman Sachs? If they break $140 tomorrow, I'm jumping in.

     I think you are probably right about the increase in fed jobs and decrease in state but again my point to the OP (that he could not grasp) is that employment figures do not measure unemployment bc any shift from a private sector job to a government one increases the government workforce without reducing the unemployment number.

    The number of former government workers filing unemployment claims is best info I have seen on this issue, and that number is substantial.

As far as I know, most of the increase in spending came out of TARP and the stimulus, which would fall primarily on the private sector.

If personal anecdotes mean anything, my office has been under a hiring freeze for the last year and a half. That's what usually happens when they can't get a federal budget passed.

I believe the TARP and the Stimulus were part of the 2009 budget. A good portion of the TARP has been paid back. A good portion of the Stimulus involved state transfer payments to protect state and local employees, i.e. teachers, first responders, etc.

That aside, how do you explain a 2011 budget of $3.8T? What are the main drivers of an increase of the Federal share of GDP from 20% to 25%? I can see a one or two year hit to GDP due to a recession, but the budget projections for years beyond 2011 are in the 25% GDP range.

Just get it back to a historical norm of 20% of GDP. Plus get tax receipts back to a historical norm of 18-20%, because today it's running at 15%.

“The reason the unemployment rate is still as high as it is, in part, is because there have been huge layoffs of government workers at the federal level, at the state level, at the local level,” he said. “Teachers, police officers, firefighters, social workers– they have really taken it in the chin over the last several months. And so, what we’re trying to do is to see if we can stabilize the budget.”
-President Obama, May 12, 2011

TOTAL GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEES
June 2007: 22,176,000.

January 2009: 22,471,000.

January 2010: 22,376,000.

April 2011: 22,594,000 (preliminary).

TOTAL STATE GOV. EMPLOYEES
June 2007: 4,918,000.

January 2009: 5,116,000.

January 2010: 5,053,000.

April 2011: 5,253,000 (preliminary).

TOTAL LOCAL GOV. EMPLOYEES
June 2007: 14,514,000.

January 2009: 14,583,000.

January 2010: 14,478,000.

April 2011:  14,492,000 (preliminary).

are being layed off. However I never hear any adminstrators such as managers etc. being layed off. The state of California bureaucracy has too many chiefs too little Indians. There is hardly anybody working the trenches at Caltrans, or the Constractor's State Lisensing Board, etc. Local City Building departments are pain to work with now, because the front desk is manned less. Yet, the local city adminstrators are still pulling their six figure incomes.

If I was governor or President I do what companies did in the eighties - layoff middle management. Government is too top heavy right now.

US Dept. of Labor Bureau of Statistics

Looking at the wiki articles on the subject, and federalbudget.com, it looks like the increases were a little bit here and there. I imagine the expanded war in Afghanistan might have something to do with it. Increased VA costs, health care costs, tax credits, a fund for future infrastructure projects. The EPA, Commerce, HUD, and State all got big boosts. And of course, there's always Defense.

In reference to what Mari mentioned, I suspect he might be right about a lot of private sector workers going to the public sector. When our local housing market crashed, it didn't stay down for long. In the last 3 yrs I've gain 112k in equity. The news ain't all good for Willy. The DC metro area now enjoys the worse traffic congestion in the nation.

-- Modified on 5/13/2011 1:25:51 AM

By "facts" I assume you mean the empiracle data I posted?  The one that listed the numbers of public employees that are stable to slightly increasing across all sectors?

The idea that Obama wasn't prepared for a townhaller to bring up the unemployment situation is absurd.  He is trying to create some kind of narrative that we need to grow government and not cut the budget to battle unemployment.  He can also "wing it" and not worry if the facts back him up because nobody in the media (accept maybe evil Fox News or Rush limbaugh) will call him on it.

-- Modified on 5/12/2011 7:45:29 PM

It blows my mind that you think the President may have just mispoke or exagerated.  Another massive budget showdown is coming with the debt ceiling vote.  Boehner is talking all kinds of smack becasue the Tea Party is pissed about the $38 Billion compromise.  Obama is beginning a narrative that budget cuts = higher unemployment.

Of course the Public Sector was protected by the trillion dollar slush fu...I mean stimulus.  It's the Private Sector that has been bleeding jobs.

When you make conclusions based on wrong data. From practical point of view, all I know is my neighbor, who is high school teacher was laid off at the beginning of the school year, schools increased class size. Just a small example and there were many reports new papers about state laying off workers. So, it is hard to give credence to your statement. When one is intent on criticizing someone for everything and anything, one can find some data somewhere to back it up. In our current climate, fact and truth have no bearing on what people say and just watch Fox news.

So don't believe my eyes, believe Obama?  I would call you a joke but that would imply you were funny instead of just sad.