Yesterday, I addressed some fun numbers for California with reference to public employees and unemployment and the like. Today, I’d like to see what the corresponding numbers are for South Dakota.
Running through the same calculations as previously, we have a non-military labor force which is about 55% of the state’s population (a bit higher than CA, but not by much). We also have about 106,000 state and local FTEs.
Comparing those numbers, as before, we have 13% of the state’s population engaged in paid government service at the state and local levels. This does not include volunteers (seen in many a small town), military and federal employees. However, even without including those groups, nearly one in seven South Dakotans are working for Aunt Pierre, Cousin Brookings, or some other member of the family.
Of course, South Dakota’s unemployment is currently low (4.8%) as compared w/California’s, but it would appear that as a percentage of the population, we are actually more dependent on government jobs than our friends on the balmy (and sometimes barmy) West Coast.
Nor are we looking at the huge state budget deficit (in part because we don’t spend very much by comparison and we already got “bailed out” with the stimulus package).
One sometimes learns rather interesting things by looking at the numbers, doesn’t one?
This post may well be a bit on the dry side, but I decided to work on it after reading that California has in excess of 2 million public employees. This gave me cause to wonder at the background for this large number.
A few notes before I dig in. Employment data is from 2007 and is largely taken from the US Census estimates of that year (the latest year for which full estimates are available). Other data is also from 2007, unless otherwise noted (links for these sources is provided with the corresponding data). Due to the nature of things, all the numbers may not come from the same point in the year; however, if you keep in mind that estimates are just that, I believe the overall conclusions are supported from the available data.
Breaking it down, we have a non-military labor force which is just a hair more than 50% of of the total population. In addition, we have roughly 1.8 million full-time-equivalent positions which are filled at the state and local levels in government positions.
Comparing those two numbers, we determine that 10% of all the employees in the state work for some government entity at the state or local level. This does not take into account part-time employment or federal employment (which would drive the number even higher).
Given all this, is it any wonder that it is a big deal in California when the state declares that it will go bankrupt unless something is done to stop the madness?
Unemployment in California was at about 11% as of April 2009. My understanding, however, is that most of this is in the private sector with very few state/local employees out of work. Receiving IOUs instead of paychecks? Perhaps. Out of work? Not yet.
As more than one person has mentioned, Californians seem to like their government services, but do not so much enjoy paying for them. Based on the recent referendum on financial measures, it would seem as though a number of public employees may be joining their private sector compatriots in the unemployment lines.
Of all the things to be excited about, the height of one’s grass does not immediately pop to mind. Well, it doesn’t for me. It apparently does for the city of Tea, SD:
Developers and residents in Tea will need to pay closer attention to their lawns this summer.
The city council voted to adopt a more streamlined and strict set of nuisance rules last week that will shorten the amount of time between infraction and reaction and require lawns in the city to be kept under 6 inches tall.
The previous rules required lawns to remain under 12 inches, and residents were given plenty of leeway when asked to clean up. Now, violators will receive only five days’ notice before the city hires someone to cut the grass and levies a $220 assessment for the work.
I don’t know about you, but a $220 fine (c’mon, it doesn’t actually cost that to cut the grass) seems a little bit over the top.
Apologies to all of you who were a bit frustrated when trying to access this site over the last few days. My hosting provider was hit with a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack which made for very intermittent service–particularly Tuesday and Wednesday. I understand that new measures have now been taken which should prevent a similar attack from disrupting things in the future.
While I am quite certain that this site itself was not the target of the DDOS, I was told that some of the specific malicious systems had been traced to Brazil, China and Russia.
Then, if that wasn’t enough, I had to monkey around the with the caching to the end that the site didn’t work properly until just a little bit ago.
The first fact of life is that we all die. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we can move on to the other facts of life. Under the microscope today is the topic of health care.
From the very readable CATO website, comes this interview on Health Care Reform. The piece is informative and well worth reading, but this little piece stood out for me when I read it:
In Canada more than 800,000 patients are currently on waiting lists for medical procedures. As the Canadian Supreme Court noted in striking down the part of Canada’s single-payer law that prohibited private payment for health care, “Access to a waiting list is not access to health care.” The court went on to note that “in some cases patients die as a result of waiting lists for public health care” and “many patients on non-urgent waiting lists are in pain and cannot fully enjoy any real quality of life.”
Given that the current population of Canada is about 34 million that would mean that 2.35% of the entire population is currently on waiting lists for medical procedures. Here in the United States (if we had a comparable rate of waiters) that would mean about 7.2 million people would be waiting for health care.
I do not know the current number of US citizens who are waiting for health care in the US (and have been unable to quickly locate that information). However, based on the general availability of health care–even for those who are not insured, I would have thought that a number anywhere near 7.2 million would have by now absolutely exploded from the news outlets under headlines such as “Millions Wait to Live or Die under Current Health Care Confusion.” Then again, I could be remarkably off.
While I would be glad to admit that our health care system in the US could benefit from a number of overdue changes, I simply cannot bring myself to believe that following in Canada’s footsteps with regard to government-provided health services will help us improve the efficacy and responsive of such care here.
One can find the unemployment rates for April (adjusted for the season) over here. I find the first five listed (with the lowest rates) to be most interesting. Here they are:
1 NORTH DAKOTA 4.0
2 NEBRASKA 4.4
3 WYOMING 4.5
4 SOUTH DAKOTA 4.8
5 IOWA 5.1
The rest of our stately neighbors may be found as follows:
8 MONTANA 6.0
30 MINNESOTA 8.1
With the exception of Minnesota (which is arguably the least business-friendly state of all listed above based on tax rates, business regulations, etc) South Dakota and its neighbors are doing pretty well.
From the list of things which one does not expect to find coming up for a vote: The disposition of a particular horse’s leavings in the town of Hot Springs. The following is taken from a brief piece written by Mayor Don De Vries:
I did not want to accept the petition, because the issue was settled in court, and accepting the petition could end up costing the city more in legal fees than the $800 we may have to pay Mr. Dahl, should the measure pass in June. This payment may not be able to be paid because of a state law regarding claims against the city. In addition, if the measure passes, the city would be required to either haul the same manure back to Mr. Dahl’s yard, or find the same quantity of similar manure and deliver it to his yard.
Please do read the entire article to get the full context (or as much as has been provided). If any of you know more of the history/background to this story, please enlighten us in the comments.
I had to laugh out loud when a friend sent me a link to the following and reminded me that he’d told me this weeks ago. Too bad I didn’t write about it then (I could have scooped the WSJ).
Consider the 1998 “Gnomes” episode — possibly surpassing Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose” as the classic defense of capitalism — in which the children of South Park, Colo., get a lesson in how not to run an enterprise from mysterious little men who go about stealing undergarments from the unsuspecting and collecting them in a huge underground storehouse.
What’s the big idea? The gnomes explain:
“Phase One: Collect underpants.
“Phase Two: ?
“Phase Three: Profit.”
[...]
This more or less sums up Mr. Obama’s speech last week on Guantanamo, in which the president explained how he intended to dispose of the remaining detainees after both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly against bringing them to the U.S.
The president’s plan can briefly be described as follows. Phase One: Order Guantanamo closed. Phase Two: ? Phase Three: Close Gitmo!
There’s more along the same lines, so let me agree with the writer (and my friend who first brought this to my attention) that the critical second phase is apparently missing in action (or inaction, as the case may be).
Unfortunately, many individuals who would consider themselves pragmatists are so focused the simple beginning and the fulfilling end that the messy middle is completely overlooked. In all fairness, I can easily do the same thing–particularly if I am desiring a specific thing so strongly that normal logic is not working very well.
The big issue is this: These are very large and complex issues at play and we are foolish to expect that everything is simply going to fall into place because we want it to. In fact, entropy is just about willing to warrant that things will fall apart–not together.
As always, Melanie Phillips casts a keen eye upon the current disgraceful happenings in Great Britain’s parliament and includes a bit of perspective from the head of the Anglican Church:
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, took instead the dismal MPs-are-victims line and called for a halt to the disclosures. In his view the point had already been ‘adequately made’, and the ‘continuing systematic humiliation of politicians’ would only undermine confidence in democracy.
Well, parliamentary democracy certainly has been undermined — not by those who have shone a light on the corruption of the system, but by those who have corrupted it.
How very depressing — if not altogether surprising — that the Archbishop of Canterbury, of all people, appears not to be able to distinguish between the two.
He rightly went on to lament the loss of integrity in our wider culture, which has degraded moral thinking to a calculation of what people can get away with. But what he fails to grasp is that his own reluctance to hold people to account for the wrong they have done is part of the reason they do that wrong in the first place.
For personal accountability, in the form of paying a price for one’s misdeeds, is essential to a moral sense. It is the breakdown of such accountability at all levels in our society that has caused the values free-for-all of which our MPs have shown themselves to be such spectacular exemplars.
[emphasis mine]
Would it be too much to consider that here in the US our current national leadership would have termed all these things “distractions” from the real business at hand? Of course, we have gotten (like the British) far off course from the understanding that the role of government is to reward those who follow the rule of law (by providing them with a place for the continuation of life, the enjoyment of liberty and the pursuit of happiness) and to punish those who do not follow the rule of law.
If one cannot trust those who are running the public till to not dip into every time they feel the need for a bit of a vacation, a new barbecue set, or even a playhouse–who is properly to blame? Does one properly blame a sheriff’s deputy for the undeniable fact that one was speeding or should one (though it goes against nature) be grateful that the fact was indeed pointed out and one has nothing to do from that point but to accept the appropriate punishment and perhaps to learn that speeding was an inappropriate response to running late for one’s own birthday party?
I am an information broker. So are you. I’ve chosen to write about certain things. You’ve chosen to read about them (and will then turn around, as it were, and choose/not choose to further disseminate that information to others).
Brokers used to be paid well (at least for brokering certain things) but now that everyone is an information broker, it has made things remarkably different for those whose job description is journalist. Robert Picard puts his finger on the core issue:
Wages are compensation for value creation. And journalists simply aren’t creating much value these days.
(His entire article is good, but that’s the distilled version.)
The relatively free exchange of information/ideas/opinions/events/everything that can be written/recorded and placed on the web by just about anyone has seen the traditional journalist coming in to competition with, well, everybody. This is not to say that journalists, because they have been taught a craft and have honed a skill set are not going to be better at what they do than others who lack that background. It is however necessary to realize that many people do not consider one’s background–just the data which is being provided. That is, consumers of information are increasingly incurious about who exactly is providing it, particularly if that information corresponds with their own worldview.
I am not a journalist in the traditional sense that I am paid to journal particular events/happenings. Most would claim that much of my reporting is derivative of others who have done the proper research, interviews, etc. They would be right, and I make it a point to credit those who have done the work. The value I bring is not necessarily the news itself but the perspective on it and, at times, the simple selection of a piece of news which some of my readers might not otherwise come across from their usual news sources, or perhaps the juxtaposition of information that would otherwise not be connected. And, of course, my invaluable opinion (but, I speak as a fool).
Speaking of opinions, my opinion regarding current journalism from old-school sources is that there is very little hard-core news reporting and much opinion. What does all of this mean for old-school journalists? Maybe it is time to head back to the basics: Who, What, Where, When, Why and How and leave the opinion/analysis to those who are (broadly speaking) not working on a deadline or expecting to feed our lifestyle/family from the proceeds of our labors.
The post just below addresses the recent credit card legislation (which has a very interesting amendment on it). Do you remember a while ago when there was the issue with the national parks not allowing concealed carry of firearms? Well, it would seem as though Senator Coburn got an amendment attached to this credit card bill (ha ha, no pun intended) which would set policy for the NPS (National Park Service) and allow the carry of concealed weapons in national parks by those who are permitted to carry in the states which share space with those parks.
It would appear that this amendment got in and stayed there because there was insufficient time to go through procedure to have it surgically removed and still meet the President’s deadline for getting the credit card legislation passed. Of course, it seems a bit strange for the President to be setting the deadline when the Congress is supposedly an equal branch of government and shouldn’t be putting anything to vote without proper research, debate and the like. Then again, I may be suffering one of my historical hot flashes.
I’m not quite sure what to think of all of this outside of perhaps being glad that I didn’t have to vote on a bill which was on the one hand completely leaving out personal responsibility and the other hand encouraging personal responsibility in the protection of human life. Though, in fairness, I still think the bill was worth voting against and that Coburn probably simply saw the pressure behind the bill as setting up the context for the move he made by proposing the amendment. That is, if some folks hadn’t been so gung-ho about getting this bill passed right now, the amendment would still be languishing on the good senator’s desk and looking for a host.
Sometimes things just are not that simple, are they?
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