Re:It's official: NASA is a jobs program.
by umjames on Tuesday August 18, 2009 @10:29AM
(#770502)
Not all of business believes in more efficiency as you describe it. I'd argue that most IT departments are just as much a jobs program as NASA, and probably for a lot of the same reasons.
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I can remember 3 huge contractions in the IT industry (early 90s recession, NASDAQ meltdown, present day). When was there ever a comparable mass-layoff scenario in the government?
End of Civial war, WW I, WW II, and Vietnam.
Most of these represented far larger drops in government employment than the end of .Com.
Releasing conscripts is hardly the same thing!
A large number of people signed up for each of those conflicts and where let go. Granted, there were also a large number of conscripts, but even ignoring conscripts they were huge reductions in the government workforce.
Edit: The Works Progress Administration (WPA) is another example which was closed down by Congress and the war boom in 1943 and provided almost 8 million jobs between 1935 and 1943. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_Progress_Administration) After employing 8 million people.