Speaking to the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce today, Mayor Daley threw some red meat their way, as the Chicago News Cooperative's Dan Mihalopoulos reported:
“You cannot allow local, county, state and federal government to
have more employees than the private sector. [...] If that takes place in America, you’ll be paying twice as many taxes as you ever had before.”
Does Daley actually think there could one day be more workers in the public sector than in the private? That's just not a realistic possibility. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are currently 483,000 public employees in the Chicago-Joilet-Naperville region -- out of 3.6 million total! Meanwhile, on the national level, there are 139 million workers, only 21 million of which are employed by some form of government.
I get that it's somewhat startling to see government bodies listed as Chicago's top five largest employers. But that doesn't mean the public sector is on its way to outsizing the private.
