The state is growing. Baltimore City is not, according to the most recent census data.
This trend must reverse itself for the state to thrive. Very likely the latest figures will be challenged by the city and revised upward as they were last year.
Instead of clawing for a few people, the city should be focusing on ways to keep and lure thousands of new, highly educated residents who command top salaries and pay thousands in taxes to the city and state treasuries.
For decades, the opposite has been true. Official policy has been to safeguard government jobs and to ship private sector jobs ? the ones those educated workers need ? outside city limits. Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers paint the picture.
From 1990 through 2007, the city lost 22 percent of its private sector work force and 13 percent of its population. But the number of government jobs declined by only 11 percent over that same period and today makes up a bigger percentage of the work force than in 1990. (The BLS does not provide a breakdown of local, state and federal government jobs at the city level for Baltimore.)
Almost one in four jobs in Baltimore City is a government job.
A government job does not produce wealth. It eats wealth. So more people on the government payroll equals a larger burden for those in the private sector.
The most recent statistics are even worse than the overall trend, as they show the number of government jobs growing by 2,200 since 2004 as the private sector lost 5,200 jobs in the same time period in the city. The total number of jobs lost in the city since 1990 is a staggering 90,600.
That means just as the need for new tax dollars is greatest, the city and state?s residents are burdened with supporting a larger government bureaucracy.
These numbers beg the question of whether government is the leanest it can be at all levels. It also shows the unsustainability of the current government work force if private sector jobs keep disappearing.
We can?t safeguard jobs and provide raises to government workers, as Mayor Sheila Dixon promised in her new 2009 budget, while wealth producing jobs flee the city.
We?ve long advocated cutting in half city property taxes, twice as high as those throughout the state, to attract and keep new residents and new businesses. But the local, state and federal government must also trim its work force in the city, whose growth is way out of whack with both the population and the performance of the private sector, if Baltimore is to become a wealth producer for the state instead of a net importer of state tax dollars.
