600,000 New Government Jobs?

Over at his ABC News' "Political Punch" blog, Jake Tapper does some interesting math on Barack Obama's Saturday radio address. The president-elect, he notes, said in the address that the "No. 1 goal" of his economic stimulus plan "is to create 3 million new jobs, more than 80 percent of them in the private sector.”

If you assume the other 20 percent are in government, that works out to 600,000 new government jobs. Presumably, the great majority of those would be at the state and local levels, where the bulk of Obama's plan to beef up infrastructure would be implemented. Still, even if a relatively small percentage were federal jobs, it would amount to a pretty substantial boost in the size of the federal workforce.