Fully expected, surprised it took this long.
IIRC, the funds went to mostly red states. So MAGA people, happy your guy came through for you again ?
IIRC, the funds went to mostly red states. So MAGA people, happy your guy came through for you again ?
But yes. I remember when Americans used to care about politicians creating American jobs as a populist stance. Those days feel like decades ago now with people celebrating the literal slashing of government jobs (who surprise, is the biggest US employer).
Why would you think there needs to be one giant employer instead of a healthy market of many?
Stats:
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics puts the total number of Americans employed by government (at any level, federal, state, local, or military) at roughly 23 million, as of Feb 2025. At the same time, private businesses employ roughly 132 million Americans, vastly outstripping the employment of the government.
This is what you want. More teachers than administrators. More private employment than tax-supported services. We need government. We need good and effective bureaucrats, even. But we should always be cautious about the economic friction that increases in the government sector usually cause.
If this is an attempt to free up labor for private industry to further diminish worker power and wages, the demographics crunch comes regardless due to the compressing working age population pyramid. The federal government creates jobs for both unprofitable yet necessary work and is an employer of last resort in the ways it offers and structures work available (military spouse flexible work arrangements, locating offices and working spaces for federal work in communities where no other employer will offer jobs, etc).
> Most Americans care about creating American jobs in the private sector not about growing the government by creating more government jobs. More Americans are employed by industry and small businesses (as it should be) than by government.
The American electorate, broadly speaking, is grossly uneducated and unsophisticated in these matters unfortunately. They don’t even know who pays tariffs, why they’re inflationary, etc.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/14/politics/the-biggest-predicto...
sure, millions of businesses if you divide it that way. Meanwhile the government is still the largest single employer in the us. Wal-Mart's global market, by comparison (the largest private market in the US) is 2.1m.
>Why would you think there needs to be one giant employer instead of a healthy market of many?
Why is Google bigger than a startup? They deal with more money and people. The government isn't running like a business but is still running on a scale of managing trillions of dollars and caring for hundreds of millions of americans. Why wouldn't our government be large?
Also, private sector hasn't exactly been stable the last 15 years if you're a normal worker. That's pretty much the one advantadge of public sector until employers can't throw out employees like livestock whenever they fancy. People claim to want more teachers but treat them horribly.
Honestly, as a recovering libertarian, I'm actually pretty enthusiastic about creating government-run services. I'd like to see far more of them, and thus far more people employed by government. For instance: I'd much rather use a weather app put out by NOAA (if only such a thing existed) than any of the private alternatives (whose business model is really to secretly invade your privacy and sell your data).
> Why would you think there needs to be one giant employer instead of a healthy market of many?
"One giant employer" is a ridiculous straw-man, but I've come to realize the market isn't a panacea. And the "optimal market solution" can actually be pretty user/customer/worker hostile.
I actually work at a private business that could plausibly be a government-run service, and I think it'd actually be pretty good for everyone if it were converted into one (so long as the government is not run by anyone with a last name of Musk).
That's exactly what I ended up doing.
That's exactly what I ended up doing. But it's a little awkward because I have a bookmark to my zip code's forecast page. An app would be nicer and more accessible to more users.
But sure, The government is redistributing its wealth and helps stimulate the rest of the economy with the workers they employ. Even for private sector it keeps the wheel turning.
By taking trillions away from the private sector (in taxes, inflation), it costs the economy tens of millions of jobs.
It then spends that to create new jobs. Some of that spending has a positive ROI, such as employing 100 police, to allow 10,000 people to focus about innovating rather than their own safety. On the flip side are many of the jobs in Washington, which dont create any multiplicative benefits for society and are net negative.
Congress allocates that, so any grievances on what they agree to spend should be take to your reps. The deadline is in 3 weeks, so be swift!
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But to go back on-topic: the everyman just sees a job they get money from and can use to invest or stimulate the economy. The other economic overhead is not affecting their day to day... Usually. At least not to a point they complain.
By your logic the only jobs that can be created is by deficit spending, and since the private sector cannot create money, but the government can, the implication is that only the federal government can create jobs.
That's what the tariffs are for. Trump 1.0 gave the US washing machine tariffs and got 1800 jobs on-shored at the cost of $800k/job:
> We find that in response to the 2018 tariffs on nearly all source countries, the price of washers rose by nearly 12 percent; the price of dryers—a complementary good not subject to tariffs—increased by an equivalent amount.