3 ms·

Yes but then it wouldn't make the (largely political) point that he wanted to make. The comparison itself seems odd. If the state's private sector loses 1.2M

• noahlt 16y ago
  His point isn't that the public sector should shed a proportional number of employees, but that the collective income of private sector taxpayers has decreased, yet they are forced to sustain public-sector pensions with that decreased income.
  • _delirium 16y ago
    How is that particular graph making that point? I can see for the 2nd pension-cost graph, but the job-losses graph appears to me to be implying "private-sector employment is falling much faster than public-sector employment". But, by using absolute numbers, it implies that the "correct" outcome, where the two curves would roughly track each other, would be for public-sector job losses in raw numbers to be equal to private-sector job losses, which would be absurd given the large difference in total jobs. With those scales, there is almost no economic situation that would result in the public-sector line being anything but flat, because its raw numbers are far too small to register much of a blip in either direction. It's hard for me to come up with a good reason for that particular choice of graph other than "political spin". One of many reasons I've switched to reading The Economist rather than the Wall Street Journal for economics-meets-politics news, since the Economist makes a more conscientious effort imo to avoid slanting their data or infographics in the direction of their editorial line (and they do take roughly the same free-market editorial line).