Shedlock’s blog item began, “The welfare state is booming along with social assistance for illegal immigrants.” By “welfare state” Shedlock meant government jobs, and by “social assistance for illegal immigrants” he meant the Bureau of Labor Statistics job category of “Health Care and Social Assistance.” The latter (according to the BLS) consists primarily of “personal and home care aides,” a cohort of health paraprofessionals who seldom if ever provide services to undocumented immigrants. The second largest group in this category is child care workers, for whom the welfare state similarly provides little employment, on behalf of undocumented immigrants or anyone else.
Sometime between January and April the Wrong Jobs meme migrated (with Lord knows how many stops in between) from Comrade Shedlock to Rep. Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina and a Conintern member in good standing. Here’s what Foxx said last week at a hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce (which Foxx chairs):
The mirage of job growth is … subsidized by gains in the public sector. It hasn’t escaped my notice that over the last two months, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that employment growth in the government sector was second only to growth in the health care sector. In March, the health care sector edged out the government sector by only about 1,000 jobs. In 2023, nearly 25 percent of added jobs were government positions, which inevitably will be paid for by private sector jobs.
By “health care sector” Foxx meant the BLS’s “Health Care and Social Assistance,” a reasonable elision considering that most of the social assistance jobs, as noted, are for health care aides. But Foxx didn’t bother to clarify that “the government” mostly meant not the federal government, a favorite Conintern whipping boy, but state and local government, and that “state and local government” meant mostly people on the city and county payroll.
