One way the government can make joblessness look like less of a problem is to hire the people who are out of work. Thus, while private companies laid off 286,000 employees during the first quarter of 2008, governments hired 76,800. Of course, this merely masks the problem and, in addition, diverts needed resources from the productive private sector to the parasitical public sector. Remember how much FDR's make-work programs did for the Depression?
