Newest National Review piece: Is the Public Sector Hurting?

My piece at National Review Online starts this way:

‘It’s very clear that private-sector jobs have been doing just fine; it’s the public-sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation is all about,” Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid claimed last week. Senator Reid is simply wrong: The private sector has suffered from much deeper job cuts than public-sector workers have faced.

Obviously, Americans are hurting, with some 7 million losing their jobs since the start of the recession. And that doesn’t include the 7.2 million people who should have entered the work force over the same time period. But the pain hasn’t been in the public sector.

The only group of workers who are “doing just fine” are those working for the federal government, where employment has increased by 11 percent since the start of the recession. Both private-sector and state- and local-government employment have fallen. While private-sector employment has recovered slightly from 7.5 percent drop it originally suffered, it is still down 5.4 percent. . . .