A central falsehood underlies President Obama’s frequently expressed desire for more “stimulus” dollars. He not so subtly suggests that the main problem in a nation which has witnessed explosive growth of the federal workforce, which has a more than $16 trillion debt and which has a series of entitlements that are rushing toward bankruptcy is that the federal government is — wait for it — too small!
Really? Who’da thunk it?
To grasp the lunacy — to say nothing of the sheer gall — of such a notion, consider the fact that the federal workforce grew by a quarter of a million employees from just before Obama took office through last September. That amounted to a 13 percent increase, and today’s civilian federal workforce stands at a grotesquely bloated 2.2 million people.
There was a minuscule decrease from last September through early this year at agencies such as the IRS, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency. But as USA Today noted, even those agencies still employed more people than they did before the Obama-era government hiring extravaganza. And not to get all picky and technical about it, but during the same swelling of the ranks of federal bureaucrats, private-sector employment was plunging by 5 percent.
Does Washington even notice all that private-sector suffering? Commentator Jonathan Chait doesn’t think so. He made a disturbingly cogent observation in a recent column.