I don’t like to see people get fired, especially me, so it’s been pretty tough sledding these past months.

Five million jobs have been lost since 2008 – 5 million! That’s a lot of displacement, a lot of pain. Economists (do they ever get laid off?) have all kinds of mumbo-jumbo terminology to describe mass firings; “down-sizing,” “contraction,” “market adjustments” and my personal favorite, “negative growth.” Five million Americans have had their personal Chrysler plant close. That’s certainly depressing even if it’s not a depression.

However, it’s not all gloom. If you work for the city of Los Angeles, you’ve been spared the pain – except for one guy.

As I said, I don’t like to see people lose their jobs, but sometimes cuts are necessary, even helpful. Consider L.A.’s fiscal mess.

Last year we had a $406 million hole in the budget. Mayor V boldly announced the city would shed 767 jobs. That showed real leadership – taking on the unions – biting the hand that feeds and votes for him, which is pretty much the same people.

However, that 767 number seems to have been pulled out of thin air, perhaps literally. After all, the 767 is one of the more popular jets the mayor uses to fly away from L.A. The actual number of city jobs eliminated was closer to 600 and all but one of those jobs was already vacant. So while the mayor pledged to trim the L.A. city work force by 767 jobs, he actually eliminated 600 vacant jobs that didn’t save us a penny since nobody held them, which leads us back to the one guy who did get fired.

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A little more than a week ago, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa delivered his annual State of the City address. The mayor’s speech was fascinating for the usual reasons, but this year it was extra special.

“These are no ordinary times in the city of Los Angeles,” the mayor said, which was the first falsehood. While he painted the grim picture of “230,000 Angelenos now standing on unemployment lines” and a “jobless rate simmering at 12 percent and rising,” he spent the bulk of his address triangulating schemes to avoid any city layoffs while offering virtually no help to the private sector.

Not a single city worker has been laid off. The private sector has borne the entire brunt of the recession, but the public employee unions are the mayor’s primary concern. So these must be ordinary times since its business as usual at City Hall.

The second whopper involves the magnitude of the deficit. The Los Angeles Unified School District budget is independent of the rest of Los Angeles government. However, most of us consider the schools to be one of the primary functions of a city – police, fire, sanitation, roads and schools – right? So how deep is the actual hole?

L.A. faces a $530 million hole next fiscal year, and the LAUSD gap is $600 million. In reality, we are $1.1 billion dollars in the red with catastrophic projections for 2010. This despite one of the highest tax rates in the country and a remarkably generous – some might argue, reckless – electorate that votes “yes” on nearly every school bond and revenue racket stuffed onto the ballot. The mayor is only on the hook for about half a billion, but we’re stuck with the whole tab.

The State of the City address was delivered among a friendly crowd of political supporters and various Spring Street camp followers at the Balqon Electric Truck factory in Harbor City. The mayor showered love on Balqon as the place where “L.A.’s economic future starts.”

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