Government Workers Are Necessary

If you listen to congressional Republicans, you might get the impression that government workers are some kind of evil luxury that just sucks up tax dollars and don't provide any needed function. They also give the impression that most of these workers are employed by the federal government. Neither of these ideas is true.

The very reason we have government workers is because we, as a society, have determined that they are needed -- needed to perform a variety of functions that we deem to be necessary. They are not a bunch of nameless and faceless functionaries in a Washington office performing no service for an inflated salary. They are the policemen, firemen, road workers, food inspectors, doctors and nurses, Social Security and Medicare claims reps, prison guards, social workers, Border Patrol officials, and myriad other people who perform a vital service in our society.

And they are not all federal workers. In fact, the federal workers make up the smallest segment of government workers. In this country, the government workers make up about 16.2% of employed people (down from 17.3% when President Obama took office in 2009). And federal workers make up only about 4.5% of the workforce, as compared to state workers (6.3%) and local workers (5.2%).

Here is a state-by-state breakdown of government workers, showing the total percentage of those working for the government along with the percentage that work for the federal, state, and local governments. It was compiled by the folks at the Gallup Poll.