Another Indictment of the Bush-Obama Years

Here's a depressing little blurb from the New York Times about the disparity between anemic job growth in the private sector and rising payrolls in the bureaucracy.

For the first time since the Depression, the American economy has added virtually no jobs in the private sector over a 10-year period. The total number of jobs has grown a bit, but that is only because of government hiring. ...For the decade, there was a net gain of 121,000 private sector jobs, according to the survey of employers conducted each month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In an economy with 109 million such jobs, that indicated an annual growth rate for the 10 years of 0.01 percent.

At some point, of course, the rising number of people dependent on government will overwhelm the shrinking number of people producing real wealth in the private sector. Nations such as France and Italy are perilously close to that tipping point. Yet since politicians rarely think beyond the next election cycle, they have little incentive to arrest the downward slide. Instead, as the current health care debate demonstrates, they seek to add more fuel to the fire.