It's non-farm payroll Friday, where we celebrate the work of everyone who isn't a farmer.  The unemployment rate stayed unchanged at 9.6% with government employment falling by 159,000 and private sector employment (mostly in health care, hospitality and mining) rising by 64,000.  Barry Ritholtz has the no-nonsense quick-take here.

I wonder if we're not going to look back on this a year from now and see a colossal blunder.  Why is the government firing people in the middle of a crisis?  We know part of the story.  77,000 of the government lay-offs are related to the census.  The census jobs were temporary by design.  The rest of the government layoffs probably have to do with other temporary jobs and with state and municipal workers losing their jobs as local governments struggle with falling tax revenues and immediate debt obligations.

The job losses in this months report are, in effect, the result of an unplanned and unfocused austerity.  The federal government is letting temporary assignments expire while local governments are cutting back.  It all amounts to an ad hoc total belt tightening that doesn't have many of the negative politcal consequences.

It's a damned shame and it's damned foolish.  The government should offer its census workers some other assignment rather than let them go.  I don't really care what but I think a pretty good argument could be made that the census work gave some of them pretty unique qualifications.  They dealt with people from all walks of life.  They got to know their communities.  Many of them could move seemlessly into social work at some level.  Heck, they could simply go out into the world with the mission of documenting the aftermath of the Great Recession much the same way that artists and writers in Roosevelt's time documented the Depression.  The point is that the Federal government, with its unlimited checking account, should not send workers out into the world until the world has jobs for them.  It's time to get creative.

That also means it's time to bail out the states and cities.  If the idea of outright paying their debts or guaranteeing their bonds disturbs you (and it does me) the Feds could step in with more targeted help aimed at funding programs that keep and create jobs.  When a municipal agency announces layoffs, the Feds could step in with money to stop them.  If the governor of New Jersey unilaterally halts construction on a badly needed $9 billion tunnel under the Hudson River, the Feds should show up and build it instead.  I know this would give local governments a perverse incentive to throw up their hands and cancel projects to get them off the state balance sheet and onto the Federal one but the Feds could always bill the states later, when times are better.

My solutions here are imperfect but I think we need to realize that now, of all times, the government should absolutely not be firing people.  It's entirely counter productive.  By destroying the demand base, the government is destroying the tax base and making its problems that much worse.