Matt Yglesias has posted a chart:

Here’s another look at the fates of the public and private sectors during the recession. Since the overall scale of private sector employment is much larger than the government sector (and rightly so), it’s difficult to get a chart that shows anything if you look at the raw numbers. So instead, this lines indexes both sectors to where they were in January 2009 when Obama took over.
What you see is that if you look at the private sector you see a fairly “normal,” albeit severe, recession. Private sector employment tumbles precipitously for a while, then hits bottom, and then starts growing consistently. And for a while, the public sector also behaves “normally,” growing at the same slow and steady trend it was growing at before the recession and providing a kind of countercyclical stabilizer. Thus, during the final year of George W Bush’s administration we actually saw a substantial rebalancing away from private sector work and toward public sector work. But since sometime in early 2009, the trend level of government employment has been sharply downward. That’s a trend that was interrupted by the census, but now looks very clear. It reflects the fact that the federal government hasn’t provided adequate aid to states and localities and the fact that conservative governors have preferred layoffs to tax increases.

You’ll have to click over to see Matt’s chart. A few tentative thoughts:

(a) Is a January 2009 baseline a good one to use relative to the alternatives? We know that job growth in the tradable sector has been almost non-existent since 1990 and that nontradable sector job growth has been considerable, but focused on health services and the public sector. I can see why we’d use January 2009 — this is roughly what the economy looked like before it fell off a cliff. But if you believe, as I do, that the big change happened around 2000 and that we’ve seen a decade-long shadow stimulus since then, a different chart would be cool. Publicly-funded job growth absorbed a larger share of the middle class as high-skill workers in high-skill teams accounted for a growing share of total productivity and earnings, and this job growth was paid for via progressive tax systems flush with revenue from high earners.

Check out this chart from the team at Political Sunshine.

(b) We know that local government accounts for the bulk of public sector jobs, and that the sharp increase in the number of teachers is a big part of the story. Would it be useful to separate out health sector jobs from other private sector jobs, given the outsized role of tax and other subsidies in this space?

(c) While it may be true that conservative governors have preferred layoffs to tax increases, did they prefer pension and health reforms to layoffs? And is this a salient fact regarding culpability, if that’s the right word?