Americans on the Public Dole

Americans on the Public Dole

The largest-ever federal payroll will hit 2.15 million people in 2010 and 2.11 million in 2011, but the true size of the federal government is much larger: it is estimated to be 15 million or more. To be more specific, by 2005, the true size of government reached 14.6 million employees, including 1.9 million civil servants, 770,000 postal workers, 1.5 million active duty military and 848,000 in reserve, 7.6 million contractors, and 2.9 million grantees. State and local government employs another 18 million (the nonprofit sector employs as many as 11 million Americans).

As of April 2009, the size of the U.S. workforce (employed and unemployed) was about 156 million (154,731,000 in the civilian workforce and approximately 1,500,000 in the military workforce). Therefore, almost 10 percent of the U.S. workforce is employed by the federal government and almost 12 percent is employed by state or local government, for a total of 22% of the U.S. workforce employed by local, state and federal government combined.

In addition, about 1 in 5 Americans receive Social Security or a government pension. And about 19 million others get food stamps, and two million get subsidized housing. For these categories, dependents as well as the direct recipients of government income are counted.

Slightly over half of all Americans -- 52.6 percent -- now receive significant income from government programs. That's up from 49.4 percent in 2000 and far above the 28.3 percent of Americans in 1950. If the trend continues, the percentage could rise within ten years to pass 55 percent, where it stood in 1980 on the eve of President's Reagan's move to scale back the size of government. That two-decade shrink-the-government trend now appears over, if for no other reason than demographics. The aging baby-boomer generation is poised to receive big payments from Social Security and government healthcare programs.

Source: The U.S. Government's Hidden Workforce