Sunday, August 07, 2011
Chart of the Day: The Real Employment Picture
Friday, Kevin Drum wrote Chart of the Day: The Real Employment Picture "The economy added 117,000 jobs in July. Unfortunately, we need to add about 150,000 jobs each month merely to keep up with population growth. So the real net job growth picture is actually negative. The chart below shows real net job growth since 2009, and it's obviously not a pretty picture. It would be nice if Republicans in Congress would allow us to do something about this."
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Here again, "Wouldn't it be nice if the republican congress would let us do something about this." I suspect, "would let us do what we think is right about this." would be more accurate. The Ds and the Rs both have thoughts about the right thing to do about this. Both sides, think the other's approach will make it worse. The Rs could also reasonably say the same quote and mean the exact opposite.
Out of curiosity, (I'm not baiting, I really don't know.) when democrats held both houses and added all that stimulus, do they see that as having worked? And, if they could just spend more, it would work even more?
I'm not sure if you can see a facebook thread I recently posted on (via my wall).
But the feeling on stimulus was it was too small. Even at the time Krugman said so. Just doing math on the size of the recession said the stimulus needed to be 2-3x bigger. Now of course we find the whole was even bigger than we thought. The stimulus worked a bit, but because of negotiations was watered down, not just in size but in effect. A third of it was tax cuts which are the least stimulative options (people save them and don't respend them).
And also, the Dems never really had 60 votes in the Senate, so they didn't really have the ability to do a lot. Remember MN couldn't count their votes for months and Kennedy was sick and not in session, etc.
But yeah, Keynesianism. The debt isn't the problem with jobs (we've had big debt for a long time). The debt is big, but it isn't the near term problem, it's a medium (post 2020) and long term problem and it's mostly healthcare related (medicare/aid). According to the CBO, Obamacare does lower the deficit, and the public option would have lowered it more. And before you say "it's always a long term problem that doesn't have to be dealt with now), Clinton did deal with it effectively. The point is, you deal with the deficit in good times and let the government be the spender of last resort in bad times.
Truly, thanks for that. I would have to say something worked a bit. (I would have attributed it to natural cycles.)
FYI, did you see this post? http://hmelman.blogspot.com/2011/07/chart-that-should-accompany-all.html
I think that really rebuts the "we don't have a revenue problem we have a spending problem" argument (the 2nd chart in that post).
Great link and useful data. Thanks. The wikipedia page for United States Federal Budget includes a section on the revenue v. spending problem. Good data there too.
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