FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF LABOR showed that the unemployment rate held at 9.7% in February. A decade ago, the rate was barely 4%. The headline number understates the true toll of lost jobs. If we include Americans who have given up searching and those who have accepted part-time jobs for lack of other options, the unemployment rate is closer to 17%. In late 2007, the U.S. had more than 139 million non-farm workers. Today it has 11 million fewer.

The government has been hiring, however. It has added nearly a half million workers since late 2007, counting federal, state and local agencies. Although jobs with good pay are particularly difficult to find at the moment, government workers do alright. A December report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that state and local governments spent an average of $39.83 per hour on workers in September. This number includes wages of $26.24 per hour, plus health and retirement benefits, vacation and sick leave and all the rest. Private industry workers cost their bosses a mere $27.49 per hour, including wages of $19.45. (Curiously, the BLS, a federal agency, publishes the cost of state and local workers but not federal ones.)

For such a generous employer, America isn t exactly flush. The federal government owes an amount equal to 60% of gross domestic product, which isn t too worrisome, considering that plenty of peer nations owe more. But few of those nations have America s additional layers of government debt. Add federal, state and local borrowings to funds owed by federal-backed agencies and the sum is 141% of GDP. As money manager Robert Arnott pointed out late last year in a note to clients, that puts the U.S. in elite company. Only Japan, Lebanon and Zimbabwe owe more.

So is the government on a reckless hiring spree? Not precisely. In January, 17.5% of non-farm workers were employed by some level of government. That s up more than a percentage point from three years ago, but it s only a half percentage point above the average since 1960. It s not nearly a record; in 1975, government employed 19.2% of the work force. Government workers have become costlier over the years, but only in absolute, not relative, terms. In 1992, when the BLS began reporting the cost of state and local government employees, these workers made 45.5% more than private sector workers, including wages and benefits. Today, they make 44.9% more.

But these numbers might not tell the whole story. According to Paul Light, an evangelist for government reform who served as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and now teaches at New York University, government has learned to present an illusion of smallness, even when it s growing quickly. Beyond government payrolls is a vast number of contractors and grantees who work for government money. In 1990, there were three and a half contractors and grantees for each federal worker, by Light s count. By 2005, the ratio was five and a half to one. If he s right, and if we assume no change in the ratio since 2005, more than one-quarter of today s workers owe their jobs to the government, and that doesn t count private workers who depend on state and local contracts and grants.

America s swelling debt makes this vast army of government hirelings look unaffordable. The snag is, in the short term, a sudden government downsizing would create an unemployment rate to dwarf Friday s number.