Government Statistics
When we look at the economics or government, we have to sort through the games to even get close to reality. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, government accounts for about 8% of jobs in the United States. Here is their breakdown using numbers easily accessible on the BLS website going into the peak of the economy back in 2006 – 2007:
1,774,000
Naturally, there are a tone of exclusions. Federal government civilian employees, excludes the Post Office 615,000, 1,172,913 Military, enlisted 230,577 Military Officers, 2,424,000 State government (excluding education and hospitals), 5,594,000 Local government (excluding education and hospitals). This brings us to a total of 11,810,490 government jobs.
The total number of jobs in the U.S. in 2006 was 150,600,000, so government
employment makes up 7.84% of all jobs.In 2007, the U.S. population (according to
the Census Bureau) was 301,621,157, so about 4% of Americans are employed by the
government.
However, what is excluded are contract workers. The Federal Government also employed 14.6 million contractors in 2006. This is like Snowden inside the NSA. About 40% of the cost is contract workers these days inside the intelligence community. This was an increase of 2.5 million since 2002, and the study attributes the increase directly to contractors hired as part of the war on terror, reported in the Washington Post.
This means, 11,810,490 full-time workers plus 14.6 million contract workers, and now there are growing numbers of part-time and indirect contracts. A company billing on a project is not contracting its workers directly. Changing the definition of a government dependent worker does not reduce the non-productive sector that contributes nothing to the national wealth. This segment has been between 30% and 40% on a collective basis for decades.
