Though down slightly in 2011, federal government payrolls have been growing steadily in recent years, adding about a million new jobs since the financial crisis began in 2008, but, that looks as though its about to change according to this survey from Gallup.

In the public sector, state and local governments have born the brunt of the bad U.S. economy, due in large part to their lack of a printing press and the ability to keep piling on debt in amounts never witnessed before on planet earth. With a much larger workforce – a combined 19 million versus less than 3 million for the federal government – state government payrolls have declined by more that 125,000 since 2008 and local governments have seen net reductions of more than a half million.

But, still, it seems the federal government has some catching up to do.

A new Gallup poll shows that, after steady improvement since the summer debt-ceiling debacle lows, confidence in the U.S. economy has steadily improved and now sits at its highest level since last May, just as gas prices near $4 a gallon were starting to bite.

An improving labor market and lower pump prices are no doubt major factors behind the recent rise that led to a surge in holiday sales as Americans renewed their decades long love affair with credit card debt (temporarily at least) as noted in this item yesterday.

While this is consistent with other measures of consumer confidence, it’s worth noting that, at -27, the latest Gallup poll readings are well below what might be considered “normal” as is the case for other gauges of  consumers’ mood that remain at “recession levels”.

While making clear that he’s not hoping for a recession, John Hussman still isn’t buying any of this nonsense about an economic recovery in the U.S. that has been gaining strength in recent months, making the following points in his weekly commentary about the data pundits have been using in support of their rosy outlooks:

Three basic issues are at play. One is that analysts aren’t making distinctions between leading, coincident and lagging data. The second issue is that there is little effort to measure the predictive strength of a given economic data point (or set of data points) in explaining subsequent movements in the economy. The third is that analysts seem to be forming expectations report-by-report (what I call a “stream of anecdotes” approach) instead of taking those reports in context of the full ensemble of data that is available at each point in time.

Let’s examine the seemingly most “compelling” data point first – the fact that December payrolls grew by 200,000. Surely that sort of number is inconsistent with an oncoming recession. Isn’t it? Well, examining the past 10 U.S. recessions, it turns out that payroll employment growth was positive in 8 of those 10 recessions in the very month that the recession began. These were not small numbers. The average payroll growth (scaled to the present labor force) translates to 200,000 new jobs in the month of the recession turn, and about 500,000 jobs during the preceding 3-month period. Indeed, of the 80% of these points that were positive, the average rate of payroll growth in the month of the turn was 0.20%, which presently translates to a payroll gain of 264,000 jobs.

Likewise, in 5 of the past 10 recessions, the ISM Purchasing Managers Index was greater than 50 just weeks before the recession began, and the new orders component of that index was greater than 50 in most cases, immediately prior to the recession. Very simply, neither a strong monthly employment gain nor a slight uptick in the PMI are informative signals that recession risk has eased.

As usual, there are some good charts in this piece along with an interesting discussion of the Conference Board’s Leading Economic Indicators.

Interestingly, with upwards of 70,000 job losses “baked into the cake” for the next labor report (due to poor seasonal adjustments in the “couriers and messengers” category as noted here and other data anomalies), a disappointing jobs report three-and-a-half weeks from now just might be enough to knock the wind out of consumers’ sails as they look over their credit card bills and regret having spent so much over the holidays (as noted here).

Some women in the U.S. are apparently a bit miffed at having participated so little in the jobs recovery over the last couple of years, this New York Post story citing a study by the National Women’s Law Center that looked at job creation between June of 2009 (when the recession ended) and December of last year. They came away wanting.

The report indicated men have claimed all but 43,000 of the 1.4 million jobs created over that time – a whopping 97 percent of the total – however, as Jake at EconomPicData shows in the chart below, this is a good example of how one can create very misleading headlines based on the selection of a start date for a data series.

Admittedly, the end of a recession is not just an arbitrary starting point, but, still, you get a completely different picture when going back a little bit further.

Though you’d think that women would have done a little better in adding jobs in recent years, men have lost nearly a million more jobs than the fairer sex since the wheels came off the global financial system back in 2008.

Now, here’s a case where seasonal adjustments are badly trailing developments in the real world as the recent increase in online purchases around the holidays – and the resulting delivery of those goods – has, presumably, caused the hiring of couriers to spike along with other holiday-related activities in December.

Here’s what the Labor Department’s “Couriers and messengers” subcategory looks like before and after seasonal adjustments are applied to the data:

Seasonal adjustments are supposed to “smooth” out these regular trends, but, for this data series, they are failing badly. Unfortunately, this is not good news for the jobs data that will be reported a month from now because, as shown above for both  2010 and 2011, those outsized seasonally adjusted job gains for couriers in December suddenly turn into big job losses – 40,800 and 48,700, respectively – which should put a damper on the January data.