The creation of more jobs generally is good news for Kansas. Jobs are the basis for supporting families and keeping communities viable.

But pleasure over reported job increase in Kansas in the last year is marred somewhat by the fact that many of those jobs were created by government agencies and, therefore, funded by tax dollars.

The Kansas Department of Labor reported this week that the number of government jobs in Kansas had grown by about 6,000 between November 2005 and November 2006. That resulted in a 2.3 percent increase in the number of people on government payrolls. The overall 4.2 percent unemployment rate last month was significantly better than the 5 percent reported in November 2005, but without the increases in government jobs, the unemployment rate actually would have been higher this year.

The recent job numbers may not have dire consequences for the state economy, but creating more tax-supported jobs isn’t the most desirable way to build the Kansas economic base. In many rural communities, government entities from school districts to federal agencies already represent too great a proportion of the local work force. Those tax-supported jobs help drive the local economies, but they also increase the need for more taxes.

There’s also the question of whether all of those government jobs are essential. In 2003, the state’s Legislative Division of Post Audit found that Kansas has more local governmental units than all but the nation’s most populous states, such as Texas and California. The audit showed 3,887 local governmental units in Kansas, ranging from drainage and cemetery boards to county and city commissions. Not all of the units have paid employees, of course, but many do. It certainly seems worthwhile for governmental units across the state to work on increasing efficiency and reducing their tax-funded payrolls.

Another way to balance the employment numbers is to increase private business investment in the state. Private businesses not only provide jobs that aren’t tax supported, they and their employees pay the taxes that help support government and government jobs. The further the state can tip that balance to private investment, the more pressure it will take off taxpayers.

In the big scheme of things, it’s better to have private jobs supporting government rather than government supporting jobs.