Do Yourself a Favor: Get a Government Job
Rob Long ·
Jul 22, 2010 at 8:11pm
It's a simple graph, but it'll make your blood pressure soar. And full disclosure, it comes from the Republicans in the House.
The Blue Line represents the increase in government employment. The Red Line represents the decrease in private sector employment.
One's going up; the other's going down. The graph forms a wonderful, evocative, appropriate "X" -- forming a perfect target on your wallet, your job, and your future. And mine. And all of ours.
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Comments :
May '10
Re: Do Yourself a Favor: Get a Government Job
Cute, but the graph is meaningless since it uses two completely different scales in the comparison. It's a contrived "x"--an old Al Gore trick. But, hey, if it tricks a few independents away from the dark side, let's go with it.
Jun '10
Re: Do Yourself a Favor: Get a Government Job
The graph would probably go nicely with a plate of Mousaka and some fresh Psomi.
May '10
Re: Do Yourself a Favor: Get a Government Job
Good call, Scott. But I think if you view it as a percentage increase/decrease graph, it is a little more to scale, off by a factor of about 2 (1% gov. increase vs. 0.5% private decrease). Which still begs the question: Y? (nauseating pun intended)
May '10
Re: Do Yourself a Favor: Get a Government Job
Correction: 2% private decrease.
Re: Do Yourself a Favor: Get a Government Job
Good luck landing that coveted federal job. I guess most Obammunists consider the 2.6 million lost private sector jobs a fair trade for the extra 0.2 million new government positions . . .unless they are unemployed themselves.
Jul '10
Re: Do Yourself a Favor: Get a Government Job
I have long thought it is time the right played the class envy game. Couple the dislike for government with its huge growth and the riches it showers on its employees compared to the private sector and you have bullet points enough to riddle the other side. This is why the oddly-named MSM is making such a big deal about the government's toilet paper crisis in New Jersey. The obedient arm of the Democratic Party wants you to think spending has been cut as far as it possibly can.
May '10
Re: Do Yourself a Favor: Get a Government Job
The story is a good one but the manipulation of figures for visual effect really gets on my nerves. I want the Right to be better than the Left, working in the realm of rationality and avoiding shameless emotional appeals (like "tax cuts for the rich"), but this is pretty low. The ability of the real story to change anyone's mind is lost if they feel they are being manipulated.
May '10
Re: Do Yourself a Favor: Get a Government Job
I'm with you; I can't stand having my intelligence insulted. I'm a wee bit torn, though, because we're in a street fight with folks who call Card Check the Employee Free Choice Act, and I sometimes wonder if there's such a thing as too much integrity. But in this case, as Joe suggests, they could have just compared percentages, still had a decent-though-not-perfect X, and not compromised their integrity at all. Annoying.
May '10
Re: Do Yourself a Favor: Get a Government Job
I think percentages are misleading in exactly the same way: they put two very different quantities on the same visual scale. A 10% discount on a haircut and a 10% fall in home prices are not the same thing.
May '10
Re: Do Yourself a Favor: Get a Government Job
Mark, really? I think it's way more deceiving to say, "The average home fell by $15,000, but the average haircut only fell by a buck!" I don't know why anyone would want to compare homes and haircuts, but if one did, it seems to me that percentages would be the only reasonable way to do it. Percentages are best for comparing private vs public jobs for this same reason, the only difference being that this particular comparison is important.
May '10
Re: Do Yourself a Favor: Get a Government Job
Yeah, you have a point and my analogy wasn't very apt. It always depends what you're trying to show. In this case, I assumed the chart is trying to give the impression that the government grew by "as much as" the private sector lost, which is false. Plotting the percentages would create the same misleading graphic while providing even less information about the actual number of jobs involved.
A better analogy to show how percentages are misleading would have been "Mircosoft laid off 20% of its programmers, but don't worry because Hank's Sandwich Shop increased 20% (from five employees to six)."
May '10
Re: Do Yourself a Favor: Get a Government Job
Mark, gotcha, and this is fun (to me, maybe you, and probably no one else). One last point: You mentioned earlier about the dems' notorious "tax cuts for the rich" formulation. Keep in mind that the only recourse we have to battle this canard is the percentage argument. That is, "Joe Sixpack had his taxes cut by 20%, but Joe Millionaire's were cut by only 3%" If we can't talk percentages--maybe even with visuals--we're screwed. The dems, understandably, only talk absolute numbers.
May '10
Re: Do Yourself a Favor: Get a Government Job
Well, I would use two different responses to that:
May '10
Re: Do Yourself a Favor: Get a Government Job
Ya, pretty good, so I guess we wouldn't be totally screwed! Still, if I had to choose one strategy--and thankfully we don't have to choose just one--I'd stick with my "Joe" sentence, complete with dramatic visual, since I think it works best in the soundbite era. But you make good points, and we can agree to disagree.
And it's late on this side of the continent, so I'm done. Thanks for the exchange.