Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Public Sector Unions and Budget Deficits: Some Graphs


With tomorrow night's debate in mind, I thought this might be a useful thing to be looking into. Both sides can take from this data and potentially make compelling arguments about the role of unions. Klein takes the stance that there is a far stronger relationship between state debt and negative equity (as in, it's the economy, stupid) and that public sector unions are not the behemoth impediments to fiscal solvency that they are being trumpeted as. But if you look at all of the data that Klein's source John Sides drew up, there is a bit stronger of a correlation between state and local debt as a percentage of state GDP and public sector union membership. The degree of causality between the two is of course up for debate, but I suppose that's what tomorrow is for!

1 comment:

David Ginsberg said...

Obviously no correlation, but the problem with gsp as with gdp is that they are as good as meaningless.