In recent weeks, President Barack Obama has gotten in a lot of trouble for a comment he made regarding the unemployment problem in America.

In response to a question about how the European crisis is affecting the American economy, he said, “The private sector is doing fine. Where we’re seeing weaknesses in our economy have to do with state and local government. Oftentimes cuts initiated by, you know, governors or mayors who are not getting the kind of help that they have in the past from the federal government and who don’t have the same kind of flexibility as the federal government in dealing with fewer revenues coming in.”

The headline of the quote, and the only part that got played every hour on cable news, was, “The private sector is doing fine.” You can see why Republicans and the media jumped on it — it sounds like Obama is saying the economy is fine and unemployment isn’t a problem.

Clearly, that isn’t the case.

Unfortunately for conservatives, it requires some nuance and depth of understanding to see what he meant. Oh, and it helps to read the whole quote, too.

You see, when you compare changes in public and private employment, it’s easy to see that his sentiment is correct.

In fact, private sector employment has grown by approximately 4 percent since its lowest point in 2009, while public sector employment has shrunk nearly 3 percent since that time.

At this point, I want to quickly point out that while these percentages sound like a small change, they account for hundreds of thousands of jobs across the whole economy.

And, since the private sector is a much larger portion of the economy — typically between 70 and 80 percent of GDP — the 4 percent growth accounts for more total jobs than a similar change in the public sector would.

Still, the main drag on the unemployment rate, and one of the only sections of the economy still actively losing jobs, is the government. This includes all levels of government: federal, state and local.

So why is the only section of the economy that we can directly control doing the worst?

For lack of a more friendly explanation, I have to just say it: Republicans are responsible.

By successfully changing the debate from a discussion on how to best address unemployment to a discussion on how best to deal with the debt, Republican officials have managed to justify cutting government jobs and cutting federal funding to lower levels of government, who then have to cut more jobs as a result.

As a society, we’re firing more people every day than almost any other industry.

Worse yet, the people we’re firing are people who we usually consider to be some of the most honorable. They aren’t all nameless, faceless bureaucrats pushing paper in a concrete office building; they’re also the policemen, firefighters and teachers in your neighborhood.

All this is not to say that the debt isn’t a problem, because it clearly is. But it isn’t such a pressing problem that it should be tended to before we solve the unemployment crisis.

Besides the fact that the United States can essentially borrow money for free — our interest rate is typically less that 1 percent — any decent economist would tell you that right now, getting people back to work is more important.

The private sector is doing fine. Certainly, it’s not doing nearly as well as we want it to, but it is growing. And it will get better.

But if we really wanted to help solve unemployment, we’d stop making such deep cuts.

Colin Crowley is a senior political science and philosophy major. His column appears online weekly. He can be reached at cocrowle@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @colincrowley.

Published on September 15, 2012 at 11:18 am