"The Unemployment Rate Without Government Cuts: 7.1 Percent"

Via the WSJ's Real Time Economics, a calculation of how costly the "sharp cuts in state and local government spending" have been:

Unemployment Rate Without Government Cuts: 7.1%, by Justin Lahart: One reason the unemployment rate may have remained persistently high: The sharp cuts in state and local government spending in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, and the layoffs those cuts wrought.

The Labor Department’s establishment survey of employers — the jobs count that it bases its payroll figures on — shows that the government has been steadily shedding workers since the crisis struck, with 586,000 fewer jobs than in December 2008. ... But the survey of households that the unemployment rate is based on suggests the government job cuts have been much, much worse.

In April the household survey showed that that there were 442,000 fewer people working in government than in March. The household survey has a much smaller sample size than the establishment survey, and so is prone to volatility, but the magnitude of the drop is striking: It marks the largest decline on both an absolute and a percentage basis on record going back to 1948. Moreover, the household survey has consistently showed bigger drops in government employment than the establishment survey has.

The unemployment rate would be far lower if it hadn’t been for those cuts: If there were as many people working in government as there were in December 2008, the unemployment rate in April would have been 7.1%, not 8.1%.

Ceteris is rarely paribus, of course: If there were more government jobs now, for example, it’s likely that not as many people would have left the labor force, and so the actual unemployment rate would be north of 7.1%. ...

It's possible to quarrel with the exact figure given above, but not the general message. One of the biggest policy mistakes that has been made during this recession is allowing government employment to fall by this magnitude. Stabilization policy calls for the opposite, a temporary increase in employment to provide employment for people who cannot find private sector jobs, and at the very least we should have kept government employment stable.