A chart of farm workers vs gov't workers would have been about as informative, and relevant. Which is to say, not at all. My grandfather farmed. My dad moved to town, first did office work, then did factory work, then finished the last twenty years of his working life in an office. I worked in an office my entire life. I'm sure that story could be repeated many times over, by most of the members of this board.
That chart is so misleading it's not even funny. Number 1: The US population has more than tripled since 1939, so the government job per population is really not that different than it was in 1939. Number 2: It highlights one industry. What about the millions of new jobs that have been created in technology since 1939? It would be the equivalent of doing something like this in 1950 and charting the number of farm workers starting in 1880 up to 1950 and "proving" how the economy is losing those "important" farming jobs while not recognizing all those manufacturing jobs that were created in that same time period. There's been a very large shift in the demographics of types of jobs from energy to engineering to information technology. To only highlight manufacturing jobs against government jobs (and a faulty statistical analysis of government jobs at that which ignores population growth), is playing tricks.
Funny. The last time goods-producing jobs spiked, eyeballing that chart, was at the beginning of WWII. That was, oh, seventy years ago by now?
Fine. So produce a chart showing tech or service jobs vs. gov't jobs...and make it for the last 10 years. Don't forget those gov't workers are (1) almost impossible to fire (2) can't be shipped overseas (3) will receive pensions/benefits that simply aren't sustainable in the coming decades. I assumed folks were sophisticated enough to understand the larger context and implications of this, but to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence at ET....
Oh please. You're another in the ten thousand and one posters who's always bearish, predicting the end because of the government and Obama and the government and the Democrats and the government and the Fed and the government and... Did I mention the government?
Why? It's a meaningless statistic. Why don't I just graph the position of Venus against it too...it would have the same correlation. btw...you seemed to have glossed over my point that government jobs have also grown at virtually the same rate as population growth...so I guess it was just as bad at the beginning of your chart in 1939 as well.
More than tripled? One hopes you are more careful with your position prices and sizes than you are with population facts. US pop in 1930: 122,775,046 US pop in 1940: 132,164,569 US pop in 2000: 281,421,906 US pop in 2010: 307,006,550 (est) More than doubled, would be apt. Yet the chart has government jobs going from about 4.5mm to 22.5mm, or from about 3.4% of the population to 7.3%. The percentage of people working for the government has doubled (or in TS speak - tripled). But a far more frightening picture would be a chart of how many people are receiving money from the government over time. That data would make a mere doubling (or tripling if you are TS) of public employees completely unimportant.