By Vince Bzdek

A couple of numbers keep bugging me.

Over the past 12 months, the number of Colorado government jobs has grown by 12,000 while private jobs increased by 10,200 jobs, according to the Common Sense Institute.

The government grew faster than the private sector.

That’s pretty weird, given the private sector is about 10 times as big as the public sector. And the public sector costs the budget-strapped state money while the private sector generates money.

I also discovered the same thing is happening nationwide. In a rare role reversal, state and local government employment growth outpaced the private sector’s rate — a phenomenon not seen since the onset of the Great Recession in 2007, according to an analysis of federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data conducted by The Pew Charitable Trusts. All told, states and cities have added more than 1 million employees since the start of 2023 and now employ more than 20.5 million people.

At the same time, the typical lag of public-sector pay behind private-sector pay has reversed. Federal data analyzed by Pew shows that public-sector wage growth has been outpacing that of the private sector since mid-2023 — the first time outside of a recession that this has happened in more than 30 years. From fiscal year 2021 through 2025, at least half the states in the country gave government employees across-the-board wage increases, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers’ spring survey.

All attention is laser-focused on cutting federal jobs right now, when maybe it should be focused more on state and local public jobs.

In Colorado, state government alone, not counting city and county government, has grown by more than 6,000 jobs and $34 million while Gov. Jared Polis has been in office, according to our chief legislative correspondent, Marianne Goodland.

Yet when we recently found ourselves facing down an $800 million budget deficit, which was mostly blamed on the loss of federal funds, our wise legislature did not cut that growing state government any. Instead, they punted to the governor, the guy who grew that government by 10%, and told him to cut it.

To address Colorado’s 2025 budget shortfall, Polis did not announce layoffs or furloughs of government workers, instead ordering $103 million in emergency spending cuts across several state departments and a hiring freeze. The freeze and spending cuts are meant to prevent more severe job cuts.

The most significant impact of Polis’ cuts will be on the Department of Health Care Policy and Financing, which administers Medicaid. The department will see $79.3 million in cuts through eight different programs, including in children’s health, treatment services, reproductive health for individuals illegally staying in the U.S., adult dental, behavioral health and adult comprehensive services.

The single biggest cut the governor made saves $38 million by forgoing a planned 1.6% reimbursement rate hike for providers who see Medicaid patients.

This is despite the fact that many hospitals in rural areas have told our reporters they can’t keep the doors open at the reimbursement rates in place before the governor’s announcement. Medicaid cuts disproportionately affect those in rural areas, seniors on fixed incomes, children and working-class folks.

In other words, it was more important to Polis to protect those 6,000 new government workers he hired than to protect seniors, residents in small towns and low-income working adults.

A lawsuit filed Sept. 30 by the Colorado Association for Behavior Analysis seeks to block the health care cuts by arguing they violate both a 2019 state law that requires parity in coverage for behavioral and mental health care and physical health care for private insurance and Medicaid coverage, as well as the federal Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equality Act.

“While the Governor has the authority to implement spending reductions during a fiscal emergency, he must do so lawfully and it cannot be by singling out critical services for kids with autism that have proven benefits,” said COABA President Rebecca Urbano Powell.

The hypocrisy of all this is that the state’s Democrats have been loudly bemoaning the federal cuts, saying they will gut Medicaid. Yet the Democratic governor’s response is to cut Medicaid some more. Or more bluntly, to effectively deny care to some Colorado recipients in some areas of the state because there will be no one willing to, or able to, see them.

Seems to me Polis could have made a decision to help insulate our Medicaid recipients from federal cuts instead of hiding behind those federal cuts and blaming them for his own cuts.

Bottom line: Once again, those among us who can least afford any sort of cuts bear the brunt.

Right now, I don’t see either party doing much to help folks who are part of the working class.

And folks, the working class in Colorado is not making it.

For the bottom 60% of households, a “minimal quality of life” is out of reach, according to an analysis from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity.

These households, which in 2023 earned an average of $38,000 per year, would need to make $67,000 to afford the items the Ludwig Institute tracks as part of its index.

On top of that, now state budget officials are putting the risk of a recession in 2026 at 50%, which of course will impact those at lower incomes the most.

Nationally, a mix of high borrowing costs, dwindling job openings and growing economic and political uncertainty have left many U.S. households at a standstill.

The government is shut down, monthly home sales have recently bottomed out, reaching lows last seen after the Great Recession in the 2000s. Hiring has stalled considerably, with employers adding 88,000 jobs over the summer, roughly one-third of last summer’s count.

The value of the U.S. dollar against other currencies dropped about 11% in the first half of this year, the biggest decline in more than 50 years, ending a 15-year bull cycle, according to Morgan Stanley Research.

Who, I ask, is looking out for the little guy?

I grew up in a Colorado that was fiscally conservative and socially liberal. In fact, I kind of thought that combo defined something unique about Colorado and gave it its independent streak.  

Smart spending combined with open-minded social policies.

Somewhere along the line, we jettisoned the “smart” in front of the spending.