Paul Krugman kills a myth about government employment

From his blog

If you read what right-wingers say about the economy — and even alleged moderate conservatives, like Tim Pawlenty — you see, over and over again, the assertion that under Obama, government employment has risen sharply even as private employment has fallen. And you even get numbers, like Pawlenty’s assertion that 590,000 public sector jobs have been added. Yet the data say otherwise. What’s going on?

Well, the answer turns out to be that during the summer, a number of the usual suspects made assertions of a big increase in government employment;here’s a sample. And as of the summer, there were in fact substantially more government employees than there had been in early 2009.

Why? The Census, which temporarily employed a lot of people, as it does every decade.

Here’s a chart of government employment back to 1999: