11.27.2024

Misinformation

Famous economist passes on misinformation.

Tyler Cowen's post Can we expect large federal workforce cuts? passes on this from the tweet below without comment so ... 

... I guess he thinks it's true?

Wow, our government employees market is now projecting a new low of just 60k cuts For context, there are a record 23.4 million government employees When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he reduced the workforce by more than 80%

As noted in many of the post's comments, this is wrong, there are slightly under 3 million Federal government employees at this time.

I believe the 23.4 million figure combines Federal and State counts. 

Chart from the Fed.

Note that contrary to popular belief, The number of federal employees really hasn't changed much since the 1970s. 

Most employee additions have come at the state level. From Statista

Total number of government employees in the United States from 1982 to 2023



The original tweet

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