Rand Paul, upon learning that he had just been schooled by collectivist Paul Krugman

This morning on ABC’s This Week, Sen. Rand Paul expressed incredulity at the numbers and figures of collectivist/socialist/Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who seemed to be suggesting that President Obama, rather than turning America into a giant, bloated, Soviet-style behemoth, had in fact overseen government jobs decrease.

Here’s the video and transcript of what went down, via ThinkProgress:

PAUL: The thing I don’t understand is that your arguing that the government sector is struggling. Are you arguing that there are fewer government employees under Obama than there were under Bush?

KRUGMAN: Of course. That’s a fact. That’s a tremendous fact.

PAUL: No, the size of growth of government is enormous under president Obama.

KRUGMAN: If government employment had grown as fast under Obama as it did under Bush, we’d have a million and a half more people employed right now — directly.

PAUL: Are there less people employed or more people employed now by government?

Of course, this must be wrong considering that Rand Paul is the most serious intellectual mind in the country when it comes to the big bad government and our economic crisis in which… oh, never mind. Here is the actual total number of government employees over the past ten years:

And even one step better, here are the per capita numbers from Krugman himself:

Of course, the larger point — besides Rand Paul once again having no idea what he’s talking about while presenting himself as one of the serious thinkers who has done the homework and should be listened to — is that unlike in other recessions (under GOP presidents) when public sector employees boomed in order to help stem the economic tide, the past four years have seen the opposite. Not only was the 2009 stimulus insufficient, but the blockage of additional funds since Republicans took over the House (and turned the Senate into a house of filibuster) has lead to the massive government layoffs at the state level. Teachers, policemen, firefighters… you know, jobs.

I know that doesn’t fit into Rand Paul’s narrative, but perhaps his newly expanded mind will be able to fit that in from now on.