Fed Chairman Jerome Powell essentially said he was unimpressed by the “strong” jobs report, and it certainly was not enough for the central bank to even consider dropping rates. I wrote how the BLS report was skewed; Americans are working more than one job and still struggling to keep up with the cost of living amid inflation. Another reason that the March jobs report was “strong” was due to the US government hiring 194,000 additional personnel to the private sector within the first three months of the year and 71,000 jobs in March alone.
These public sector positions are now on the taxpayers’ payroll. The public sector produces absolutely nothing and will not add to GDP growth. By comparison, government grew by 11% during the first three months of 2019 before Biden. The private sector rose by 4.3% in 2022 before slowing to 2.3% in 2023. The public sector, not the private sector, is growing at an alarming pace. Government hiring rose a full percentage point from 2022 to 2023 by 2.7%, marking the highest annual increase since 1990.
The government cannot hire manufacturing jobs and added a total of 0 new manufacturing roles in March. Police agencies have been defunded and are operating with a dangerously low number of officers. The government is increasingly created unnecessary agencies to solve nonexistent problems like DEI and climate initiatives. I discussed in a previous post how the public sector leeches off of the taxpayer and has become a form of welfare that is used as a political weapon.
Javier Milei of Argentina’s first point of order in restoring his nation was to eliminate useless government agencies and downsize government. “The main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism,” Milei said to a hostile crowd at Davos. “We’re here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world—rather they are the root cause.”
Now, the Biden Administration has been blocked from hiring even more public sector employees. Without pushback, the Biden Administration would have multiplied the IRS and other agencies that are intrinsically unpatriotic and are used as weapons against the American people, the very people funding these agencies through taxation.
I also highlighted that these newly created nonprofit government-funded agencies are inefficient. An audit in California found that the $24 billion granted to numerous agencies to combat homelessness was never regulated or required to show results. Instead, homelessness more than doubled and you have people within these nonprofit agencies raking in hundreds of thousands per year to do absolutely nothing.
We have seen what happens when governments grow to disproportionate figures and it never ends well. The longest reigning empire, the Roman Empire, fell as a direct result of an oversized public sector that bankrupted Rome. The private sector produces economic growth, while government is a public servant consuming the wealth generated by others.