Eye2theLongRun

In hawking around their various positions the government and the media and unions and employers have invented vast and complex debates about how many jobs have been created and/or lost. All fun and games and the source of endless debate and calculation.

It is difficult to get away from the proposition, it seems to me, that from a taxpayers point of view the critical point is simply whether the government payroll, adjusted for inflation, has gone up or down. Whether that payroll should have gone up or down is another matter involving quite separate considerations largely concerned with what value the taxpayer gets from the expenditure and whether or not that “value” is wanted.

There is no doubt great debate to be had over those matters but it seems ill advised to continue to waft endlessly over what should and should not be counted as a job, a vacancy, a newly created job (or vacancy) and the like. Let us at least start with some statistic which reflects what we are seeking – which, depending on what agenda you are pushing, is an increase or a decrease.