Growth in Government Employees in Arkansas
Posted on August 25th, 2009
I have been doing a little research into the growth of government in Arkansas. The above graph is from data collected from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). I accessed the BLS information from the Arkansas Labor Market Information website.
The latest numbers from the BLS are for 2008. However, if you recall, I was keeping a running count during the legislative session and blogged about it here.
At that time (I eventually lost count), we had added 10,043 new employees to agencies comprising 52,081 employees. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that we had 72,900 employees in 2008. If you can linearly extrapolate for estimating how many new employees were added in the last session that would be 10,043x(72,900/52,081) = 14,057. If it were not for ARRA (Federal Stimulus) hiring, I would suspect that the total number of new positions added to the State payrolls this session would in reality be somewhere between about 10,000 and 14,000, probably closer to 11,000. However, I am not even sure anybody has a handle on how many new employees are being added due to Stimulus positions.
To put this into perspective, the State of Arkansas added 23,400 total new positions since 1990. That is an average rate of about 1,300 new positions per year with growth being pretty much stable at that rate without any large jumps. This year we added about 10 times as many employees as any year previous. That is absolutely staggering.
However, until this years explosive growth of state employees, the fastest growing segment of government as determined by number of employees is our local government. That is to say, our city and county governments have grown fastest. Notice the rapid rate of growth in the chart at the top of this post. So many people only concern themselves with federal elected offices and federal government, but perhaps we should keep a closer eye on things right at home in our city and county governments. Oh yeah, and start asking why we increased the size of the state government payroll in one year the amount it usually takes 9 or 10 years to achieve at a time when we are facing an economic downturn and potential budget shortfalls. This is simply irresponsible management of the people’s tax dollars at a time when they can ill afford to pay more in taxes.
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One Response to “Growth in Government Employees in Arkansas”
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Douglas Ward Says:
August 26th, 2009 at 12:32 amSafari v4.0.3 test
