E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute's Empire Center does a really exemplary job of answering Yale professor Robert Shiller's New York Times column bemoaning the supposed plunge in state and local government employment. Mr. McMahon reports:
relative to pupil enrollment, local school employment remains higher than it was in 2000, the peak of the nation's last sustained economic expansion. (Specifically, as of July 2000, there were 130 local government education employees per 1,000 pupils enrolled in the fall of 2000. As of July 2012, local government education employment came to 132 workers per 1,000 pupils in projected fall enrollment.)
Read the whole thing, as they say.
