Given that job growth is a lagging indicator, I'd guess that household income probably follows this trend pretty well.
The first thing that happens is that hours are cut. Next, jobs are cut. Then in recovery, hours are increased before jobs are created. So, I'd guess that household income would follow this plot pretty well.
Well, that would probably only hold true for people with jobs. Given the millions of jobs that have been lost, once those households are accounted for, you'd probably see a rate change, but not an absolute change. Then again, this data is a rate anyway, so it still might be comparable.
Here are the total non-farm earnings from 2000-2010 (prelim data for 1/2010 and 12/2009). This plot shows the same trend for 2008-2010: a sharp decrease, followed by a leveling off. I'd suspect that if this data was plotted in the same manner as the Obama graph that it would look very similar.
One thing that this graph shows is just how much the last decade didn't matter.
Yeah, sure. Jobless recovery, right? With old-method unemployment calculations in the 20% range, and the State lie being @ 10%. Seems dire in an economy whose GDP is 70% spending. (Note the media often compares old-method numbers (which are higher) to new method, this in and of itself is propaganda).
Treasuries - 80% were bought by the Federal Reserve in 2009. Interest rates unsustainably low, and if the rates pop to attract new investors, debt service load will go form 6-8% of budget to multiples of that.
1 in 6 FHA loans in the trailing 12 months is delinquent.
Deficit spending is at an all time high and burgeoning when there is potential to need to raise rates to attract treasury investors. Very, very dangerous to be there. China this week unloaded 32 billion in treasuries. Japan is now #1 holder of debt. US borrows Chinese money to arm Taiwan, and wonders why China is upset.
These "Teaparty" issues have percolated up with Ross Perot several times before. One might take a look at perotcharts.com before spouting off about progressivism being a good thing (The top 1% earners pay 40% of all taxes. The top 10% pay 60% of all taxes, yet there is "more" wanted by the supposed proles, but more like its incited class warfare to create division despite the evil rich paying a lot of the freight.) . Yet, as Perot and folks like Ron Paul were laughed at in the past, now not so much. You see, they (Perot, Paul, others) basically predicted the future with shocking accuracy. The deficits, the spending beyond income even during prosperity, the perpetual wars and the unfunded social entitlement programs that have no hope of working even during good economic times is eclipsing American power.
Some are trying to erect a quasi-socialist state like that of say, Sweden. Yet, Sweden is a homogeneous culture, small population ~9 million, good natural borders and before rampant taxation moved a number of prolific businesses away, this country of 9 million made cars, cell phones, jet aircraft, heavy industry equipment, gave rise to Ikea, etc.
The problem is simple. The US is 300+ million with a leaky border. Entitlements will break this union faster than can be imagined. One might argue this is the point and a Cloward-Piven strategy, but its probably just ignorance.
The US competes with India and China. Brazil and Russia are also players, but the two main players are India and China. These countries are not dumb, are being lead in a much smarter way, and are not shooting themselves in the foot. These "socialist/communist" countries are nothing of the sort, the entitlements are bare to non existent, they foster business, ruthlessly defend local business against foreign business and are more capitalist than the United States. They have more people in their top 10% of every category than the US has people.
Also, there are many fiscal bombs in the waiting. A list ensues.
Mandatory spending: $1.89 trillion (+6.2%) (FY2009)
*
o $644 billion - Social Security
o $408 billion - Medicare
o $224 billion - Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)
o $360 billion - Unemployment/Welfare/Other mandatory spending
o $260 billion - Interest on National Debt
Please note the ADMINISTRATION costs of all this psychotic spending is in the DISCRETIONARY budget and is not listed here. (e.g., Social Security is ~ 9billion/year)
REPEAT:
64%++ of our federal budget is: Social Security, Welfare, Workfare, Interest on Debt, Medicare, Medicaid. This has proven over time to be the biggest financial mistake ever made, and China and India don't have to repeat what is dooming the USA to be a second-world country.
Federal Budget Deficit Bomb: It started with Bush: The wars, TARP, spending. Obama is only accelerating spending. His budget for 2010 is $14.3 trillion. It was $7.8 trillion in 2005. The CBO predicts future deficits around 4 percent through 2020. America's debt at 84 percent of GDP will soon pass that toxic 90 percent trigger point
(1) Foreigners cut Treasury stakes; rates could rise
Foreign demand for short-term Treasuries tumbles, led by China; chance of higher rates looms
Martin Crutsinger and Bernard Condon, AP Business Writers, On Tuesday February 16, 2010, 5:12 pm EST
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A record drop in foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury bills in December sent a reminder that the government might have to pay higher interest rates on its debt to continue to attract investors.
China reduced its stake and lost the position it's held for more than a year as the largest foreign holder of Treasury debt. Japan retook the top spot as it boosted its Treasury holdings.
The Treasury Department said foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury bills fell by a record $53 billion in December. That topped the previous record drop of $44.5 billion in April 2009.
Private analysts, though, were split over the significance of the decline. Some doubted that the drop in foreign holdings of short-term Treasuries signified growing unease about holding U.S. debt. They noted that net purchases of longer-term Treasury debt rose in December by $70 billion.
But other economists saw the decline as a warning signal. They fear that foreigners, especially the Chinese, have begun to worry about record-high U.S. budget deficits and are looking to diversify their holdings.
A sustained drop in foreign demand for dollar-denominated assets could lead to higher U.S. interest rates and falling stock prices. Those trends could threaten the U.S. recovery. But economists said they see no such evidence yet.
The Treasury report showed that China reduced its holdings of Treasury securities by $34.2 billion in December.
Alan Meltzer, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said China's shift should be a wake-up call for Washington.
"The Chinese are worried that we have unsustainable debt levels, and we do not have a policy for dealing with it," Meltzer said.
He said the Chinese worry that confidence in the U.S. government's ability to repay its debt could erode. That would cause the value of Treasuries and the dollar to fall -- and lead to losses on Beijing's' U.S. debt holdings.
The Obama administration on Feb. 1 released a budget plan that projects the deficit for this year will total a record $1.56 trillion. That would surpass last year's record of $1.4 trillion deficit.
The recession helped drive up the deficits. Tax revenue fell as the economy slowed. And spending undertaken to support the economy and stabilize the financial system worsened the budget gaps.
The administration has pledged to address the budget gaps. President Barack Obama has said he will appoint a commission to recommend ways to trim future deficits. But China and others have expressed doubts about the commitment of the United States to reduce the red ink.
Moody's Investors Service has warned that the U.S. government's top credit rating could be jeopardized if the nation's finances don't improve. Asked about this report, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said this month he was confident the United States "will never" loose its sterling credit rating. He predicted foreigners would keep buying U.S. Treasurys as a safe investment.
Some private economists warned against reading too much into December's drop in foreign purchases of short-term Treasury debt. They noted that the figures are volatile from month to month. They also pointed out that Europe's debt crisis has put pressure on the euro and boosted demand for U.S. Treasurys and the U.S. dollar.
"China may not be too happy with us right now, but you have to ask, what else are they going to do with their money?" said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York.
The Treasury International Capital report showed that net foreign demand for long-term securities totaled $63.3 billion in December. This figure includes Treasury debt, debt of government sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as the bonds sold by privat...
All I know is large corporate employers have been not only laying off but having salary freezes for the last few years. I've asked around and this is true for almost anyone lucky enough to have employement but unlucky enough to be a wage slave.
Yet prices for goods and services have climbed horrifically in the past few years. Take a look at http://www.economist.com/markets/indicators/displaystory.cfm... - The Economist commodity price index - 30% inflation in one year! Are you getting 30% more salary than you got last year?
I was lucky enough to go long on various commodities when a lot of this started. Didn't have much to spare but dumped everything I could in a metals basket. Cashed out, paid off various things, started a business, got back in the market, and as of now it's far more than half again the value I put in.
So this story is about how things are supposedly turning around, and if we look at the change from last month, hey, maybe they are. But as others in the thread have pointed out far more eloquently, the piper has yet to be paid. This whole situation is and has been a cascading systems failure and the Federal Reserve and the US government are forced to become beholden to more and more entities - first the airlines, banks, mortgage brokers, auto manufacturers, on and on, and always Wall Street holding a gun to Bernanke's head because they know he'll cave - after all he did the first time! and the second! and so on; with the citizens and shareholders (anyone with a salary, fixed welfare/pension, or savings) bearing the brunt and with no say.
http://www.economist.com/markets/indicators/ - "Economic and financial indicators, Feb 11th 2010": Ben Bernanke, the Fed’s chairman, said that he expected to consider raising the discount rate “before too long”, but that the Fed’s benchmark interest rate was likely to remain unchanged.
It's actually the first derivative. It's the change in employment (jobs) per month. So it's a pretty reasonable statistic.
What's wonky about it (from a mathematical perspective) is that it's labeled 'job loss,' yet a negative number implies that jobs were lost in the month. One would expect that a net loss of jobs in a month on a graph labeled 'loss' would result in a positive number.
Well, the Obama administration is arguing that it's good even though we're still losing jobs because we're losing them at a slower rate, i.e. the second derivative is positive. And if we're going to play that game, it looks like the third derivative had already become positive by the end of Bush's term...
Right, but the point is that the raw data is in the "second derivative" format - the total number of jobs in America is not recorded/reported every month, the change in the total number of jobs is.
If they're willing to go trillions into debt for this 'recovery', why not just give everyone a guaranteed basic income of 1000 dollars a month, that comes to about 3.5 trillion. In teturn, scrap welfare and minimum wage and bailouts to banks, and you might have a thriving economy where everyone chooses how to spend their time.
I've suggested this in the past, usually with the proviso that nobody would be willing to actually do this.
The underlying philosophy is that it is the job of the government to guarantee sufficient resources to survive. By giving it to everyone you make everyone benefit which makes everyone want to keep it. (The same principle that makes Social Security impossible to get rid of.) But once government has taken that step, then there is no need for separate welfare programs, there is no reason for a job to provide a living wage (hence the removal of minimum wage), and there are not artificial barriers where a single mom on welfare has incentives to not work.
Another crazy idea I have is to fix the student loan programs so that parents are expected to have living costs that a reasonable for some time in this century (currently they are appropriate for the 1960s) but then only make students at universities whose average tuition is in the bottom 75% eligible to receive any kind of government financial aid. This would provide a downwards pressure on tuition to stop tuition from rising substantially faster than inflation, as it has done for the last few decades.
They way to fix tuition fees is simply to stop providing government guaranteed loans, most students nowadays don't get a financial return on their investment (and many pass the bill to the taxpayer by defaulting).
The problem with that is that you've just massively increased the economic barriers for poor people who want to go to college.
My proposal provides a very clear incentive to universities to not jack up tuition while continuing to provide reasonable educational access to people whose families are not in the top x% of the population.
By eliminating loans, most universities would be drastically cut their fees. Good poor students could get scholarships and bursaries which is already the case.
Colleges are bogus insitutions, they have been since the advent of the book, radio, television, and especially now with internet.
How many hackers would love to have a steady and certain $1,000/mo! I could live on that for sure. And I'd be so bored I would invent, I would innovate, I would improve the world around me in lots of ways that may not be profitable, but would really make life better for a lot of people.
Where'd you get 3.5 trillion from? I calculated only $2.6 trillion for a year of it; I used a population size of about 218 million adults. Still, it sounds a lot better than a trillion dollars to the banks.
Edit: Ah, looks like a population of about 300 million gives 3.6 trillion.
It only taks about 250,000 dollars in the bank earning 4 per cent to retire at 1000 a month. Your average doctor could retire after 2 years, yet they continue to work.
The type of people who would quit for just 1000 a month at say age 20-50 are mostly on welfare already.
The people who earn 1000 a month today are probably not creating much societal wealth anyway (creating exportable goods or new technology).
How is deficit spending related to job gain/loss? One school of economics (I can't remember which), says that in a recession, the state is the only player big enough and with a long enough time horizon to take on debt to increase demand in the economy.
So, if you're comparing job gain/loss to deficit spending, then... spending more money correlates to a slowing in the rate of job loss.
Congratulations, you just demonstrated the opposite of the point I think you were trying to make.
And if you look at the graph, it doesn't make sense, at least in this context. One series is Total budget deficit, the other is increase in national debt. So, it looks more like a graph trying to show the changes in the national debt that aren't related to the budget deficit. That is to say, off-budget expenses (wars, etc...).
That's actually not the same data. The original graph is number of jobs gained/lost. Your link is the unemployment rate. In order for you to directly compare the two, you'd need to actually look at the derivative of the unemployment graph.
That's not to mention that the unemployment numbers aren't directly derived from the number of jobs gained/lost. You can start generating jobs and still have unemployment stagnant for a variety of reasons (population and workforce growth, for example)
So, while this is the landing page for a political campaign, it is an honest visualization of the data. Pesky things, those data.
There is a joke about politicians that you can tell how bad the economy really is by the order of derivative they have to use to get positive numbers. Apparently order 2 is sufficient.
What is this new graph supposed to illustrate? I understand that by calling it "pesky" you're speaking in a sort of code, which is meant to signify factual victory on a disputed point.
But you're right: the charts show exactly the same thing. A rocketing unemployment rate beginning in early 2008, the rate of increase of which slowed by early 2009, and which has now leveled off. Both charts accurately show that there were huge job losses in one period, followed by a slowing and (for now) arrest of those losses.
The one you linked to is concededly uglier (pesky things, those ugly graphs) but otherwise it's unclear to me what it's supposed to show.
An old hobbyhorse of mine: the perception of data is directly linked to how it is presented. (See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=802439 although I think I've done it maybe three times on HN.)
Are you isamuel like "Ian who has known me for a decade" isamuel? If so, you already know this. If not, trust me on this: I have strong political beliefs, generally do not communicate them in code, and have almost zero desire to discuss them on HN. (Though if Obama is A/B testing that page I am so there for that discussion.)
This graph discounts one thing, using massive deficit spending to accomplish this and have no real infrastructure improvements at the end will leave a debt-hole which will become impossible to service. The price for this profligacy will likely be collapse.
"Main Street" didnt cause this. Sure you could blame the military industrial complex or the banking cabal and banking oligarchy, but propping up too big to fail institutions (called the Bernanke put) incentivizes failure.
These graphs are interesting. http://www.nowandfutures.com/key_stats.html Sudden and massive deflation? That usually means rampant and almost insurmountable job loss is just around the corner.
47 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 78.7 ms ] threadThe first thing that happens is that hours are cut. Next, jobs are cut. Then in recovery, hours are increased before jobs are created. So, I'd guess that household income would follow this plot pretty well.
Well, that would probably only hold true for people with jobs. Given the millions of jobs that have been lost, once those households are accounted for, you'd probably see a rate change, but not an absolute change. Then again, this data is a rate anyway, so it still might be comparable.
Here are the total non-farm earnings from 2000-2010 (prelim data for 1/2010 and 12/2009). This plot shows the same trend for 2008-2010: a sharp decrease, followed by a leveling off. I'd suspect that if this data was plotted in the same manner as the Obama graph that it would look very similar.
One thing that this graph shows is just how much the last decade didn't matter.
http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?data_too...
Given population growth, winding up at the same hours a decade out is a significant per capita cut in hours worked.
Treasuries - 80% were bought by the Federal Reserve in 2009. Interest rates unsustainably low, and if the rates pop to attract new investors, debt service load will go form 6-8% of budget to multiples of that.
1 in 6 FHA loans in the trailing 12 months is delinquent.
Deficit spending is at an all time high and burgeoning when there is potential to need to raise rates to attract treasury investors. Very, very dangerous to be there. China this week unloaded 32 billion in treasuries. Japan is now #1 holder of debt. US borrows Chinese money to arm Taiwan, and wonders why China is upset.
These "Teaparty" issues have percolated up with Ross Perot several times before. One might take a look at perotcharts.com before spouting off about progressivism being a good thing (The top 1% earners pay 40% of all taxes. The top 10% pay 60% of all taxes, yet there is "more" wanted by the supposed proles, but more like its incited class warfare to create division despite the evil rich paying a lot of the freight.) . Yet, as Perot and folks like Ron Paul were laughed at in the past, now not so much. You see, they (Perot, Paul, others) basically predicted the future with shocking accuracy. The deficits, the spending beyond income even during prosperity, the perpetual wars and the unfunded social entitlement programs that have no hope of working even during good economic times is eclipsing American power.
Some are trying to erect a quasi-socialist state like that of say, Sweden. Yet, Sweden is a homogeneous culture, small population ~9 million, good natural borders and before rampant taxation moved a number of prolific businesses away, this country of 9 million made cars, cell phones, jet aircraft, heavy industry equipment, gave rise to Ikea, etc.
The problem is simple. The US is 300+ million with a leaky border. Entitlements will break this union faster than can be imagined. One might argue this is the point and a Cloward-Piven strategy, but its probably just ignorance.
The US competes with India and China. Brazil and Russia are also players, but the two main players are India and China. These countries are not dumb, are being lead in a much smarter way, and are not shooting themselves in the foot. These "socialist/communist" countries are nothing of the sort, the entitlements are bare to non existent, they foster business, ruthlessly defend local business against foreign business and are more capitalist than the United States. They have more people in their top 10% of every category than the US has people.
Also, there are many fiscal bombs in the waiting. A list ensues.
Mandatory spending: $1.89 trillion (+6.2%) (FY2009) * o $644 billion - Social Security o $408 billion - Medicare o $224 billion - Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) o $360 billion - Unemployment/Welfare/Other mandatory spending o $260 billion - Interest on National Debt
Please note the ADMINISTRATION costs of all this psychotic spending is in the DISCRETIONARY budget and is not listed here. (e.g., Social Security is ~ 9billion/year)
REPEAT:
64%++ of our federal budget is: Social Security, Welfare, Workfare, Interest on Debt, Medicare, Medicaid. This has proven over time to be the biggest financial mistake ever made, and China and India don't have to repeat what is dooming the USA to be a second-world country.
Federal Budget Deficit Bomb: It started with Bush: The wars, TARP, spending. Obama is only accelerating spending. His budget for 2010 is $14.3 trillion. It was $7.8 trillion in 2005. The CBO predicts future deficits around 4 percent through 2020. America's debt at 84 percent of GDP will soon pass that toxic 90 percent trigger point
U.S. Foreign Trade Bomb: $400...
From the past week:
(1) Foreigners cut Treasury stakes; rates could rise
Foreign demand for short-term Treasuries tumbles, led by China; chance of higher rates looms
Martin Crutsinger and Bernard Condon, AP Business Writers, On Tuesday February 16, 2010, 5:12 pm EST
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A record drop in foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury bills in December sent a reminder that the government might have to pay higher interest rates on its debt to continue to attract investors.
China reduced its stake and lost the position it's held for more than a year as the largest foreign holder of Treasury debt. Japan retook the top spot as it boosted its Treasury holdings.
The Treasury Department said foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury bills fell by a record $53 billion in December. That topped the previous record drop of $44.5 billion in April 2009.
Private analysts, though, were split over the significance of the decline. Some doubted that the drop in foreign holdings of short-term Treasuries signified growing unease about holding U.S. debt. They noted that net purchases of longer-term Treasury debt rose in December by $70 billion.
But other economists saw the decline as a warning signal. They fear that foreigners, especially the Chinese, have begun to worry about record-high U.S. budget deficits and are looking to diversify their holdings.
A sustained drop in foreign demand for dollar-denominated assets could lead to higher U.S. interest rates and falling stock prices. Those trends could threaten the U.S. recovery. But economists said they see no such evidence yet.
The Treasury report showed that China reduced its holdings of Treasury securities by $34.2 billion in December.
Alan Meltzer, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, said China's shift should be a wake-up call for Washington.
"The Chinese are worried that we have unsustainable debt levels, and we do not have a policy for dealing with it," Meltzer said.
He said the Chinese worry that confidence in the U.S. government's ability to repay its debt could erode. That would cause the value of Treasuries and the dollar to fall -- and lead to losses on Beijing's' U.S. debt holdings.
The Obama administration on Feb. 1 released a budget plan that projects the deficit for this year will total a record $1.56 trillion. That would surpass last year's record of $1.4 trillion deficit.
The recession helped drive up the deficits. Tax revenue fell as the economy slowed. And spending undertaken to support the economy and stabilize the financial system worsened the budget gaps.
The administration has pledged to address the budget gaps. President Barack Obama has said he will appoint a commission to recommend ways to trim future deficits. But China and others have expressed doubts about the commitment of the United States to reduce the red ink.
Moody's Investors Service has warned that the U.S. government's top credit rating could be jeopardized if the nation's finances don't improve. Asked about this report, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said this month he was confident the United States "will never" loose its sterling credit rating. He predicted foreigners would keep buying U.S. Treasurys as a safe investment.
Some private economists warned against reading too much into December's drop in foreign purchases of short-term Treasury debt. They noted that the figures are volatile from month to month. They also pointed out that Europe's debt crisis has put pressure on the euro and boosted demand for U.S. Treasurys and the U.S. dollar.
"China may not be too happy with us right now, but you have to ask, what else are they going to do with their money?" said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York.
The Treasury International Capital report showed that net foreign demand for long-term securities totaled $63.3 billion in December. This figure includes Treasury debt, debt of government sponsored enterprises such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as well as the bonds sold by privat...
Yet prices for goods and services have climbed horrifically in the past few years. Take a look at http://www.economist.com/markets/indicators/displaystory.cfm... - The Economist commodity price index - 30% inflation in one year! Are you getting 30% more salary than you got last year?
I was lucky enough to go long on various commodities when a lot of this started. Didn't have much to spare but dumped everything I could in a metals basket. Cashed out, paid off various things, started a business, got back in the market, and as of now it's far more than half again the value I put in.
So this story is about how things are supposedly turning around, and if we look at the change from last month, hey, maybe they are. But as others in the thread have pointed out far more eloquently, the piper has yet to be paid. This whole situation is and has been a cascading systems failure and the Federal Reserve and the US government are forced to become beholden to more and more entities - first the airlines, banks, mortgage brokers, auto manufacturers, on and on, and always Wall Street holding a gun to Bernanke's head because they know he'll cave - after all he did the first time! and the second! and so on; with the citizens and shareholders (anyone with a salary, fixed welfare/pension, or savings) bearing the brunt and with no say.
http://www.economist.com/markets/indicators/ - "Economic and financial indicators, Feb 11th 2010": Ben Bernanke, the Fed’s chairman, said that he expected to consider raising the discount rate “before too long”, but that the Fed’s benchmark interest rate was likely to remain unchanged.
It's not good, it's not getting better, it's just getting worse slower, with hope of getting better soon.
What's wonky about it (from a mathematical perspective) is that it's labeled 'job loss,' yet a negative number implies that jobs were lost in the month. One would expect that a net loss of jobs in a month on a graph labeled 'loss' would result in a positive number.
This is the actual raw data. All of the other statistics (unemployment rate, etc) are derived from these numbers.
It's highly massaged data, always has been, always will be.
And there's no guarantee whatsoever that it's massaged in the same way month to month. None at all.
The underlying philosophy is that it is the job of the government to guarantee sufficient resources to survive. By giving it to everyone you make everyone benefit which makes everyone want to keep it. (The same principle that makes Social Security impossible to get rid of.) But once government has taken that step, then there is no need for separate welfare programs, there is no reason for a job to provide a living wage (hence the removal of minimum wage), and there are not artificial barriers where a single mom on welfare has incentives to not work.
Another crazy idea I have is to fix the student loan programs so that parents are expected to have living costs that a reasonable for some time in this century (currently they are appropriate for the 1960s) but then only make students at universities whose average tuition is in the bottom 75% eligible to receive any kind of government financial aid. This would provide a downwards pressure on tuition to stop tuition from rising substantially faster than inflation, as it has done for the last few decades.
sigh If only I ran the country...
My proposal provides a very clear incentive to universities to not jack up tuition while continuing to provide reasonable educational access to people whose families are not in the top x% of the population.
Colleges are bogus insitutions, they have been since the advent of the book, radio, television, and especially now with internet.
Edit: Ah, looks like a population of about 300 million gives 3.6 trillion.
It only taks about 250,000 dollars in the bank earning 4 per cent to retire at 1000 a month. Your average doctor could retire after 2 years, yet they continue to work.
The type of people who would quit for just 1000 a month at say age 20-50 are mostly on welfare already.
The people who earn 1000 a month today are probably not creating much societal wealth anyway (creating exportable goods or new technology).
Here's another page with a graph in it, from the same data source:
http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet?data_too...
Pesky things, those graphs.
So, if you're comparing job gain/loss to deficit spending, then... spending more money correlates to a slowing in the rate of job loss.
Congratulations, you just demonstrated the opposite of the point I think you were trying to make.
And if you look at the graph, it doesn't make sense, at least in this context. One series is Total budget deficit, the other is increase in national debt. So, it looks more like a graph trying to show the changes in the national debt that aren't related to the budget deficit. That is to say, off-budget expenses (wars, etc...).
That's not to mention that the unemployment numbers aren't directly derived from the number of jobs gained/lost. You can start generating jobs and still have unemployment stagnant for a variety of reasons (population and workforce growth, for example)
So, while this is the landing page for a political campaign, it is an honest visualization of the data. Pesky things, those data.
But you're right: the charts show exactly the same thing. A rocketing unemployment rate beginning in early 2008, the rate of increase of which slowed by early 2009, and which has now leveled off. Both charts accurately show that there were huge job losses in one period, followed by a slowing and (for now) arrest of those losses.
The one you linked to is concededly uglier (pesky things, those ugly graphs) but otherwise it's unclear to me what it's supposed to show.
An old hobbyhorse of mine: the perception of data is directly linked to how it is presented. (See also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=802439 although I think I've done it maybe three times on HN.)
Are you isamuel like "Ian who has known me for a decade" isamuel? If so, you already know this. If not, trust me on this: I have strong political beliefs, generally do not communicate them in code, and have almost zero desire to discuss them on HN. (Though if Obama is A/B testing that page I am so there for that discussion.)
Financiers? Investors? Irresponsible American consumers?
D: All of the above.
More to come on that.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_obam...
http://www.nowandfutures.com/key_stats.html#pain_misery "Pain and misery index": unemployment plus consumer price index.
http://www.usatoday.com/money/economy/inflation/2007-06-13-i... http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/05/core-measures...