Blogs For Victory

I recently came across a graph being put out by Barack Obama’s Organizing for America, which tries to graphically demostrate the success of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and suggest the under the Bush Administration job losses increased, while under Obama job losses decreased:

Look convincing?  Maybe to people who want to believe what it claims to say, but let’s really look at what’s going on.

These are job loss numbers… No matter how you slice it, these are negative numbers. The graph has some accompanying text that references the same CBO report that I recently proved was a flawed analysis.

Now, one thing to consider is that the cyclical nature of the economy means that  in a recession job losses will start off larger and slow down. The stimulus wouldn’t change that. and clearly, based the graph, the rate of decrease in the job losses hasn’t come any quicker that the rate of increase. Of course, if a double-dip recession occurs, as is feared, Obama’s minions will have a hard time using charts to paint the blame on Bush.

So, with job losses naturally declining, what numbers are more telling to look at? Well, let’s look at a chart of the unemployment rate for the same period of time in the graph above

The above chart, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows an increasing unemployment at the same time the Obama graph shows a decreasing rate of job losses. Of course, the unemployment was supposed to stay below 8 percent and not hit double digits because of the stimulus… but Obama’s graph doesn’t say anything about that.

Another aspect of the Obama chart worth addressing is the misleading nature of the labeling. In other words, by simply saying pre-2009 in Bush and and post-2009 is Obama does not tell the story accurately in any way, shape or form. The facts are that Democrats have controlled Congress since January 2007. When they control legislation and the budget process, to ignore that when talking about the economy is foolish.

So, I thought it be interesting to look at the unemployment numbers from 2005 to 2010, to see the trend and compare it to when power changed in Congress…

Interesting, isn’t it?  The economy appears to be quite stable and with low unemployment before the Democrats took over.  In fact, after the Democrats had power, unemployment slowly started trending upward, only to get worse in 2008. Democrats, once in power, made Republican spending look restrained, and one of their first big pushes was for an increase in the federal minimum wage, which, contrary to their claims, sent unemployment in the wrong direction, and in particular sent the unemployment rate of working age teenagers skyrocketing

So, Obama-bots ought not to read too much into the graph put out by Organizing for America… the millions of people who have lost their jobs under Obama probably aren’t comforted by meaningless statistics that offer no proof of success for legislation that he promised would keep them working.

UPDATE: This is another tellling graph. And be sure to keep this in mind.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan: Fannie Mae seeks $15.3 billion more in bail out funds.