CHART: Over 500,000 Government Jobs Lost Since Obama’s Inauguration

So should we blame today’s bad jobs numbers on Barack Obama’s big government policies? Again, I doubt it. What we continue to see are decent—though not great—private sector job numbers offset by tumbling public sector employment:

For a while temporary census-related jobs masked the underlying trend, but we’ve been steadily shedding government work. Maybe you think that’s a good thing. Certainly most of President Obama’s critics from the right claim to believe it’s a good thing. But what happens when you shed public sector jobs amidst an already weak economic climate is the sharply reduced incomes of the former teachers and whatnot lead to them spending less in their local communities. In total, we have about 500,000 fewer people working for the government since Obama’s inauguration even though the national population is larger than it used to be.