States' Fright
by digby
This is a fascinating article about the GOP assault public employees. If it weren't for them taking a wrecking ball to state government wherever they have the power to do so, this country would have emerged from recession much earlier:
The conservative Republicans who took power in Pennsylvania in 2010 have had a busy year. Republican state legislators, empowered by new control of the governorship and the state house, proposed one of the most stringent mandatory ultrasound bills in the country. The House passed a voter identification law that could block 700,000 Pennsylvanians from voting, most of them young, of color, and poor. Meanwhile, the same state legislators led a successful charge to shrink public employment. The number of government employees fell over 3 percent that year, one of the sharpest declines in any state. Before the cuts, “Pennsylvania [had] the second lowest number of state workers per capita, already,” said Rebecca McNichol, Pennsylvania state director of the CLEAR Coalition. Yet, she says, “this past year the budget was devastating” in deeper cuts.
Pennsylvania isn’t alone. Republicans seized control of both branches of the legislature in 11 states after the 2010 elections. It’s in these very states that public sector layoffs are disproportionately concentrated, leading to one of the biggest rounds of job losses for the public workforce since record keeping began. Governors and state legislators promised to focus on creating jobs and balancing budgets during campaign season—even newly elected Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett still claims that creating jobs is one of his “top priorities.” Instead, these newly Republican states are targeting public workers, causing a significant drop in employment in the public sector that has threatened the entire economy.
And it's a vicious circle. The more the the right cuts government the worse government works and the more people want to cut it. And keep in mind that this is the vaunted laboratories of democracy, not the hated federal government:
President Obama is often blamed for the precipitous drop in government payrolls—even though it was caused by shrunken budgets at the state level. “There is no reason to think Mr. Obama is as happy about the reduction in government workers as some Republicans. But like it or not, the Obama administration has turned out to be anything but a big-government one,” wrote Floyd Norris in the New York Times. It’s true that during Obama’s tenure, government employment at all levels dropped by 1.2 percent in 2011, one of the largest declines in history. The federal government lost a proportional share of these jobs: about 13 percent of government workers are employees of the federal government, and about 13 percent of overall public sector job losses in 2011 happened there. But what’s critical to understand is that the drop-off in employment in state and local government wasn’t spread evenly across states, and this trend had almost nothing to do with Obama or his policies.
I don't think his rhetoric or policies helped in making the case for government, but it doesn't appear to be significant in hurting the recovery. No, what's hurting the recovery is a bunch of Tea Partiers hacking away at needed government services by cutting programs and firing workers.
This is the conservative dream come true. I hope all these people who vote for them enjoy their freedom --- to have a lower standard of living than their parents and create an even lower one for their children. It's a proud legacy, I'm sure.
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