--ggg-- "Louisiana: America's Socialist haven"
By Christopher Tidmore, Political Columnist
January 3, 2005
The president of the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry is known as a curious man, ever ready to go on the search for a new tidbit of information, regardless of how busy he is. Little would Dan Juneau expect to find out that his home state qualified as a socialist economy.
He commented to the Louisiana Weekly, "The numbers jumped out at me as I read the online article in The London Daily Telegraph. The story was about the dire threat the European Union (EU) is facing from China's technology and manufacturing industries. Noting that trade between China and the EU had gone from a surplus in 1995 to over a trillion-dollar deficit in 2002, the article focused on the need for Europe to reduce its regulatory burden to better compete with the Chinese industrial juggernaut. The article then focused on a recent study conducted by the European Commission on factors influencing Europe's trade problems (including the high percentage of GDP consumed by taxes)."
"What caught my eye," he explained, "was the following passage about the percentage of government employment in England, one of the EU's strongest trading partners: 'In a chapter on public sector employees, the report said Britain is acquiring a top-heavy structure with 18.8 percent of the workforce now employed by the government...'"
Sitting in his office, Louisiana's chief business lobbyist began to wonder if quasi-socialist countries in Europe consider 18.8 percent of the workforce being located in government to be top-heavy, how Louisiana might stack up by comparison. The result were both interesting and disturbing, to Juneau and many good government activist across the state.
The latest figures released by the Louisiana Department of Labor showed that 1,946,200 workers were employed in Louisiana. Of that total, 379,600 are on government payrolls. Some brief calculations revealed that consequently 19.5 percent of the individuals in Louisiana's labor force are government employees.
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