How hard shall we govern you – let me count the ways! A peek under the kimono of the ever-increasing taxes paid to fund inefficient socialist bureaucracy.

PETER HALLIGAN

Musk and his DOGE team are finding hundreds of billions of dollars in wasteful and profligate spending amongst federal agencies.

How many government workers SHOULD it take to run a country? Well, excluding health care, perhaps this many:

Population figures in millions – country then government employees then the percentage of government employees relative to the total population.

Why aren’t the percentages closer to 3% or 4%? Looks like there is a swamp in every one of these large countries!

Ok, that table is the TLDR version, keep reading for the rabbit holes it took to get there!

I thought I would try to find some global context on the levels of spending on the provision of public services amongst the various countries and jurisdictions to get some sense of the size of government that provides similar basic needs to populations.

The value of such an exercise is obvious – obtaining the data and stablishing the metrics for quality is not.

Imagine a world where the numbers of the unemployed were at a minimum – the labour force participation rate closer to 90 per cent than 60 per cent and the massive fiscal surpluses that this would cause. An additional healthy 30 per cent earning good wages and paying taxes of 20,000 bucks a year rather than taking 20,000 in benefits a year = a swing of 40,000 bucks for the 30 per cent of the working age population of the US of around 207 million – a benefit of 40,000 times around 60 million = 2.4 trillion bucks A YEAR!!!

The current labour force participation rate is 62.6%.

Civilian labor force participation rate

Well, maybe an increase in the labour force ticipation rate of just 4 pr cent is more realistic and a net positive to the Treasury of 300 billion bucks a year.

There are “woke” barriers to the extra participation, not least the availability of profitable enterprises. Some key barriers to profitable employment are DEI.” net zero”, illegal immigration and the poisoning of the workforce with poorly made, experimental gene modifiers.

Beyond these headwinds facing profitable employment are the self-perpetuating bureaucracies that are needed to “administer” them via “central government”, which, by and large past a certain point, is a key component of socialism.

Regular readers will have noted several recent articles that highlight the “bloat by woke” policies in local authorities in manly, Australia and in the UK’s failed NHS – awarding high six-figure salaries to bureaucrats who achieve appalling results. There are 8 million people in the UK on hospital waiting lists for example and the UK has no compunction in draining scarce nursing staff from India, Nigeria and the Philippines every year, for many years, rather than supplying nurses via the required 2–4-year training required. The UK prefers not to “grow your own”.

Those foreign nurses and doctors bring an average of four relatives each with them – all legal This is on top of the million or so illegal immigrant beggars that receive a higher priority for medical attention than tax-paying Brits.

Anyway! I wanted to get an idea of the pay and numbers of civil servants employed.

I ran across this on Wikipedia here:

List of countries by public sector size – Wikipedia

“This is a list of countries by public sector size, calculated as the number of public sector employees as a percentage of the total workforce. Information is based mainly on data from the OECD^[1][2][3] and the ILO.^[4] If a source has figures for more than one year, only the most recent figure is used (with notes for exceptional circumstances).”

Data is old. From 2013 mostly.

“In OECD countries, the average public sector employment rate was 21.3% in 2013.^[1]”

Here’s a ranking from top down for those above the OECD average:

The USA is at 17.6%.

Quite staggering relative expenditure of the Scandinavian countries – double that of the US. of course, these numbers are subject to different structures around the splits between national, state. city and local jurisdictions – the “Scandis” may prefer government to perform tasks that other countries place in the private sector – so no help really!

The ILO stats cover many countries not covered by the OECD data, here’s the worst of the worst.

These numbers are subject to all srts of measurement errors and biases – and not just political prefernces. Nonwtheless, one can imagine the aspirational objectives of these countries.

So, a few clues, but a bit of an out of sate brick wall. I didn’t check the oeCD website fr updats – my bad.

Curiosity peaked around the – 50% larger public service for the Scandinavian countries and the low numbers for France and Germany, I went down the EuroStat rabbit hol and ended up in the remuneration section here:

c50d2386-0b5a-7392-9145-bfd977e1a04d

and this:

Information on data – Civil servants remuneration – Eurostat

and here:

db86d4fb-b036-4495-52f9-3333746c5d63

which has this table:

And this:

I read the methodlogy and notes – well some of them – and called a halt when faced with this:

“The labour cost index control indicator is not available for all Member States. Relatively big differences are apparent for some Member States. They result from conceptual and statistical differences between the nominal gross specific indicator and the control indicator. Only for 2 countries (IT, LU) is the control indicator within ± 1.0% of the global specific indicator”

Only a bureuacrat or tm f bureacrats could fist devise such a table and second interpret it, let aone recomment policy changes per country to the politicians of that country – let alone the citizens of that country.”

And here’s the point. The data is not “apples and apples” and cannot be directly compared.

Sp that’s two rabbit holes and two brick walls at the end pf them!

All part of the swamp that makes sensible governmet impossible.

One last attempt at something useful.

Let’s see what Brave Ai can tell us about the size of the public sector in France, Germany, the US and UK.

“As of 2020, the French civil service employed 5.7 million people, including subsidized contracts, which is an increase of 33,700 from the previous year.

This figure includes state civil servants, territorial civil servants, and hospital public service employees. In 2017, the state civil service had 2,504,900 civil servants, the territorial civil service had 1,969,900, and the hospital public service had 1,189,800.”

Population of France = 66.6 million. Call it 4.5 million excluding health care workers.

These civil servants will compile the country’s own data and provide services, which will include am of people dedicated to compiling data for the EU commissions 70,000 bureaucrats, who have their own requirements – same goes for data requested by the OECD, ILO, UN etc with other teams of people required to comply with EU instructions on EU regulations.

Remember the EU has three presidents – the president of the “Council of Leaders”, the president of the EU Commission and the president of the EU Parliament. Each of these has a bureaucracy within the EU and one at national country level.

Okay, here’s Germany.

“As of the latest data, the public sector in Germany employs around 1.76 million civil servants at federal, state, and local levels, along with 3.34 million other employees, as of September 2023.

Two trade unions have warned of a significant retirement wave of the baby boomer generation, with about 1.3 million public sector staff set to retire by 2030. This could exacerbate the current shortage of around 840,000 full-time employees.”

5.1 million in total. The population of Germany is 84.1 million.

UK

“As of the third quarter of 2024, the number of public sector employees in the United Kingdom is approximately 6.12 million, accounting for around 18% of all those in paid work. This includes 3.97 million employed by central government, 2.04 million by the National Health Service (NHS), and 1.99 million by local government.

2 million for the UK NHS and 1.2 million for France – population difference of 2.8 million? Hmmm.

Call it 4.3 million outside health care. The UK has a population of 69.4 million.

Now for the USA:

“In 2023, the total number of government employees in the United States, including both state and local governments, was around 19.58 million people.

Additionally, as of November 2024, the federal government employed just over 3 million people.

This makes the federal government the nation’s single largest employer, although it employs only about 12% of all government employees, compared to 24% at the state level and 63% at the local level.”

Around 20 million, with most employed at the local level (2/3). The US has a population of around 34. Million.

How does that leave us?

Number of government bureaucrats to run the four countries:

France needs 21% more government workers to run its country – with the UK and Germany in between. I consider ALL these countries to have a bureaucratic swamp!

Onwards!!!

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This article (How hard shall we govern you – let me count the ways! A peek under the kimono of the ever-increasing taxes paid to fund inefficient socialist bureaucracy.) was created and published by Peter Halligan and is republished here under “Fair Use”

Featured image: marxist.com

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