MORE: How Bad Is It?

Depressing numbers. And after watching congress the last two weeks it is hard not to be more depressed.

The modification to rexpress the drop as a percentage of workforce should be pretty straightforward. I’d love to see the charts that his reworked numbers yield.

PD: Homework on the weekend? You are tough.

Even with the corrections, I don’t think the chart will look that much different.
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The country has only grown in size a few percent since 2001 and maybe a little more than 10% since 1990, which will have the affect of making the 1990 curve look somewhat deeper but the 2001 curve won’t change much at all.
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It’s a great effort though, KT.

Can anyone really beleive you can just throw tax cuts at the next Depression?

http://www.political-buzz.com/

I know we want to find some way to make this not seem as bad as it is but the truth is when you think about it its probably worse. What we can’t know is how many people who were into retirement have lost their savings and are now struggling and might have to go back to work to survive. Then you have places like California putting people on furloughs so technically they are still employed but they aren’t getting paid what they are used to which means they will have their budget stretched to the limit. This economic crisis hits so many people in so many different ways that I really think the hard data is only showing the tip of the iceberg somewhat.

What 53_3 said, which is more or less what I said last night. Also worth noting that the graph showed signs of the job losses bottoming out or at least declining in the previous recessions, while the trend line in this one is accelerating downwards.
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You all might want to watch this bit of brutal honesty from Maddow: “Republicans may not like it but the way to create jobs fast is through spending. It matters when you’re wrong. A whopping proportion of the Republican rhetoric about stimulus is wrong – total economic bull puckey. It’s time to take the radical step of privileging correct information over incorrect information.”
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/29062335#29062335
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Wouldn’t it be nice if, given the horror of that graph KT posted last night, the rest of the media chose to “take the radical step of privileging correct information over incorrect information.”
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Just a thought.

wvng
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Of particular interest was Rachel Maddow’s reporting on food stamps which according to Moodys is the MOST stimulative tool that we have in our tool box. You get almost two dollars of stimulus for ever 1 dollar put into food stamps. But what did they cut out of the “compromise” bill? Money for food stamps.

In case you missed it, ex wingnut John Cole made a useful observation on bi-partisanship yesterday:
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I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.
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Reminds me of David Sedaris on undecided voters last fall.

I mentioned it last night, but worth noting again and highly recommended. Moyers had a superb segment last night on the beltway culture and dysfunction that allows, even promotes, the failure to “take the radical step of privileging correct information over incorrect information.”
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NYU journalism professor and PressThink blogger Jay Rosen and political journalist and Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald explain to Bill Moyers that the press, once seen as an agent for change — the "fourth estate" checking power in America — has become thoroughly enmeshed in the establishment, and has a vested interest in preserving it.

By the way, now they are saying that Obama is fear mongering like Bush but I would like to point out something. He isn’t using some “secret” information when he talks about the economy. He is using the predictions of economists across the spectrum. Anything he is predicting will happen is the same thing Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman is predicting, the same thing the CBO is predicting and even most Republicans are also predicting. Thats not fear mongering, thats telling the truth. Anybody who thinks he is just bullsh*tting about the job losses we are looking at if we do nothing are probably the same ass holes who claimed for 10 months that we weren’t really in a recession and or “the fundamentals of our economy are strong”. Hell if anything he probably isn’t really revealing just how bad it is. I really hope at some point journalists end their attempts to try make everything President Obama does comparable to George Bush. But I won’t be holding my breath.

sgw – yes, that might help a poor person in addition to helping the economy. Heavens.
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One of the points in the Moyers segment last night was that the media filters out any discourse that challenges their world view. Which is why an Amy Goodman will never be allowed in discussion panels because she would eviscerate false talking points, when the accepted protocol is to nod politely no matter what is said.
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btw, still waiting for Maddow to invite Goodman on to discuss media dysfunction. That would be a great segment.

I wish BHO January 2009 would have a chat with BHO February 2008
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McMANUS: Senator Obama, one other thing both of your health insurance proposals have in common is they would cost billions of dollars in new spending, and both of you have proposed raising taxes on a lot of Americans to pay for that and for other proposals. Well, now, you know what’s going to happen this fall in the general election campaign. The Republicans are going to call you “tax-and-spend” liberal Democrats, and that’s a charge that’s been effective in the past. How are you going to counter that charge?

Obama responded: “I don’t think the Republicans are going to be in a real strong position to argue fiscal responsibility, when they’ve added $4 or $5 trillion worth of national debt. You know, I am happy to have that argument.”

What we can’t know is how many people who were into retirement have lost their savings and are now struggling and might have to go back to work to survive.
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my guess is that relatively few retired people “lost their savings”, because the financial advice that people get when they retire is to get out of the stock market, and into low-risk interest bearing investments.
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That is not to say that a lot of them won’t have to “tighten their belts”, just that relatively few have been “wiped out.”
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A far bigger problem probably exists with people who are approaching retirement age, and who didn’t get out of the stock market — and made plans (and took on debt) based on portfolios that are now worth far less. These folks are in deep doo-doo, because their fixed expenses in retirement will require them to liquidate their assets too quickly.

sgw: “That’s not fear mongering, that’s telling the truth. ”
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Yes, but to state that you utterly fail to draw the false equivalencies that prove Obama is just as bad as Bush, now that Bush is gone and the media feels free to talk about how bad he was – except when they are giving Bush people (Card, Cheney, Gonzales) free access to spout whatever self-serving insanity they chose to spout.
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Anyone find a clip from yesterday of Sanchez and Boehlert yet?

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Well, thanks for the cheerful Saturday morning news, Karen!
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(>.<) – ouch!

What p-luk said. But, of course, any retirees who were vested in pension plans that have been wiped-out are wiped-out.

PNNTO
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You must not have seen the new radio address for today.
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sgw – you are the man!

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wvng: Anyone find a clip from yesterday of Sanchez and Boehlert yet?
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Transcript here, about halfway down the page. You can get the Daily Show portion from the Daily Show website.

wvng: Thanks for the Sedaris link! That made my morning! (Wish I’da seen that link in October when my friends and neighbors were all crinkling their noses because they felt the chicken was not cooked thoroughly enough!)
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KT: The scary part about the curve is that the job loss rate is not decreasing. We’re in for another 2,3, 4? months of 500K jobs cuts. A fast acting stimulus is what we need…
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…is there any polling data out there tracking industry responses to the questions:
1) How many jobs can you avoid cutting if your company gets a tax cut?
2) How many jobs can you avoid cutting if your company gets a contract from the government to build (something)?
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I’d like to think that questions like these could help counter the GOP misinformation machine.

sgw – I just watched the whole thing. M ind boggling. Does the phrase “blinded by ideology” come to mind? I guess one of the core problems with the republican party is that they have mostly purged people from serving who are not ideologues, who can think outside of the constraints of a narrow ideological box.
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Brings this to mind:
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In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might “argue back” against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same “backfire effect” when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration’s stance on stem cell research.

SG-uh, thanks? Coburn is certainly a leading light for the republicans.

Without getting mired in details, its safe to say that the Stock market drop has reduced the number of people who can safely remain out of the workforce.

pluk
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You are right in the sense of what “should” be happening with retirees. However for a very brief period I worked in financial services. And what I found was that there is a class and wealth discrimination that goes with advising retirees. You have to remember, a lot of the middle class to lower middle class workers never have a regular financial advisor. The reason being managing an individual retirement account normally doesn’t bring in the advisor much money. So what happens is that these people set up their retirement accounts initially and then just let it go. Not all of them are highly educated or financially savy. Besides that even when they go looking for advice when an advisor sees they have a retirement account many of them look to “churn” the retiree. That means making them pull money out of the retirement account to put into a different investment vehicle that won’t substantially help them but will help the advisor by earning them a bonus on the transaction. It happens a lot more than you would think. And the thing you have to remember is that this is one of those rare times when the stock market is low AND the bond markets aren’t doing that great either. I have to admit that I am somewhat happy that I left that job when I did because while we were taught not to churn because its illegal we were also given a wink and a nod about what we should do when dealing with retirees.

PNNTO
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LOL I posted the wrong link. Hold on
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Shrewdly done SG! Nice compare and contrast between Coburn and BHO.

PNNTO
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LOL I wish I were that dastardly but I have to admit it worked out well.

This ought to end well.
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“Michael S. Steele, the newly elected chairman of the Republican National Committee, arranged for his 2006 Senate campaign to pay a defunct company run by his sister for services that were never performed, his finance chairman from that campaign has told federal prosecutors.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/06/AR2009020604151.html?wprss=rss_politics

There was no need to do these calculations. The steepness of the drop was the point.

PNNTO
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I was just about to post on that at my blog. Its going to be interesting to see how much the guy who kept saying we didn’t know enough about Barack Obama says about this issue. I hope they grill the sh*t out of him. But then again IOKIYAR rules probably apply.

How bad is it? Bad enough for EVERYONE to be concerned. In the immortal words of my fellow Louisianan James Carville, “The graveyards are filled with indispensable people.”

SG-I have to be honest and say I couldn’t care less about Steele, but it IS pretty funny and the timing is perfect.

Carville would know. Sorry, that was unnecessary.

PNNTO, I think it is safe to say that you are not alone in not caring about Steele. Hard to imagine the media picking up on this. IOKIYAR after all.
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sgw, that was a perfect setup even if unintended. President Obama was very nicely on point in that video. Really making the case, and not shying away from saying that republican economic ideology was a failure. Good. Now every singe spokesperson needs to be on point saying the same things.
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Somebody suggested the other day that they need to set up a web page that shows exactly what the package will bring to each state. I agree.

jay: There was no need to do these calculations. The steepness of the drop was the point. as well as the apparent acceleration.

Without getting mired in details, its safe to say that the Stock market drop has reduced the number of people who can safely remain out of the workforce.
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I know a guy who was making his living day trading. Didn’t strike me that he was unemployed until the bottom dropped out. Nor him.

Sure wvng. First AND second derivative.

From Jamison Foser:
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If there’s one fact that should be made clear in every news report about the stimulus package working its way through Congress, it is this: Government spending is stimulative.
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That’s a basic principle of economics, and understanding it is essential to assessing any stimulus package. So it should be an underlying premise of the media’s coverage of the stimulus debate. Unfortunately, that hasn’t been the case. Indeed, reporters routinely suggest that spending is not stimulative.
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Economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, explains: "Spending that is not stimulus is like cash that is not money. Spending is stimulus, spending is stimulus. Any spending will generate jobs. It is that simple. … Any reporter who does not understand this fact has no business reporting on the economy."
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Unfortunately, many of the reporters who have shaped the stimulus debate don’t seem to understand that.

wvng
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They already have. I pointed it out on John Cole’s site
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here is one site that helps explain the effects of the recovery and reinvestment package
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http://otrans.3cdn.net/45593e8ecbd339d074_l3m6bt1te.pdf

And here is the state by state data
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http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/documents/White_House_Releases_Additional_State1.pdf

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Grover Norquist:

The economy began to collapse when the Democrats captured the House and Senate and we then knew that the lower tax rates on individuals, capital gains, and dividends would end after 2010.

We are in the early stages of the Reid/Obama/Pelosi recession and nothing they are even talking about doing will help.

g-c, in response to that Norquist quote, John Cole said:
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You. Can’t. Spoof. These. People. They have no shame. None. *** Update *** Just so we are clear how brazen and shameless and amazing this is, the NBER has determined that the recession started in December 2007, thirteen months before the Obama inauguration. As I write this, there have been sixteen posts, and none of the other authors there have corrected them, although Ramesh Ponneru took issue with a different aspect of his post. The whole Republican barrel of apples is rotten.
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Cole also noted this morning that “Ron Brownstein—the one political reporter I take seriously” wrote this:
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From a Democratic perspective, much of that investment—for new roads, transit systems, or school construction—serves the dual function of creating short-term jobs and encouraging long-term growth. But the bill also emphatically expands programs targeted more at the far term than the near term—from aid to schools in low-income areas ($13 billion) to expanded college loans ($16 billion) and scientific research ($10 billion). .

In normal times, Congress might never enlarge so many programs at once. But, as with Reagan’s tax cut, the crisis-induced demand for action may suspend the normal laws of political gravity—and allow Democrats to redirect federal priorities as boldly as Reagan did. “This is a once-in-a-25-year opportunity to [implement] a lot of our agenda,” a top House Democratic aide says. Largely for that reason, most congressional Republicans are likely to resist the plan, no matter how many more tax cuts Obama offers them.

I love The Corner. When they aren’t discussing the alternate universe they inhabit they congratulate each other on their “hipness”.

PNNTO, perhaps if one perceived The Corner as performance art it would be more palatable.

Marc Ambinder tells us: It’s OK To Be Afraid Of Something That’s Really Scary

Open Left tells me there is an:
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a "Rocky and Bullwinkle" episode about an epidemic of stupidity. Boris and Natasha are watching in the Congressional gallery as a Senator intones "We’ve got to get the government out of the government!" Some things never change.
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Sadly, no video.

As always, atrios distills the 200 proof essence of what happened in the Senate last night:
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I Beg To Differ
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Steve writes:
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But there is! And Ben Nelson and Susan Collins managed to find it. Depression’s on them.
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http://www.eschatonblog.com/2009_02_01_archive.html#7439902385789074667

@sgwhiteinfla’s 9:52 comment. That’s true of most of the people I work with. A grand total of 2 of my fellow workers have financial planners that they rely on. I’m not one of them. Both of them only took some of their planner’s advice. They lost their asses. I’m only 16 months away from being able to retire without penalty. I can retire at 55 but have decided to work until I’m 60. Finances are less than half of my decision to work a few extra years. I’m going to continue working because I love my job, the pay is good, the job is secure and the entire crew is tight. This is the only job I have had in my entire 34 year working career. I know how rare that is and how fortunate I am. My heart goes out to those who have lost their jobs or are in danger of losing them. If my taxes need to be raised or my pay would have to be cut to help others keep their jobs, I’ll gladly accept it. The TARP package may work. I have called my congressman several times and he supports it also.

Fundamentally our crisis is that the banks that make up the foundation of our economic system are insolvent. Insolvent. How an economic system survives such a calamity isn’t readily apparent. I think a depression of some level is probably impossible to prevent at this point.
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Saw Maddow last night too…powerful. She’s a giant. There isn’t anyone at Time Magazine who comes close to her, either for lack of effort, or to curry favor w/ corporate or some other degeneracy. Had our journalistic ranks consisted of Rachel Maddows, we’d be in a much stronger position now.
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“I know a guy who was making his living day trading. Didn’t strike me that he was unemployed until the bottom dropped out. Nor him.”
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That’s why I got into currencies, it doesn’t matter which way the market is trending. So far I’m still staying up late and sleeping in.

cincy, I agree on Maddow. There is literally no one else in the msm who consistently provides a window into actual truth. Olberman would be closest, but bombast tends to detract.
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atrios has a pithy thought about Senator Claire McCaskill:
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Proud we cut over 100 billion out of recov bill.Many Ds don’t like it, but needed to be done.The silly stuff Rs keep talking about is OUT.
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That silly stuff includes big reductions (relative to the House Bill) in food stamps, school construction, head start, and COBRA subsidies for people who have lost their jobs.
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Is anyone out there one of her constituents. She needs some serious schooling. I just sent the following note to my Republican congresswoman Capito:
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I am extremely disappointed – no, angry -in the Republican response to our rapidly degrading economic situation. In your recent email, you made a virtue out of reticence on wasteful federal spending. While we clearly want to get the biggest downstream bang from every dollar, the simple economic reality right now is that federal spending on infrastructure and support for the states is by far the best way to stimulate our economy and create jobs.
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The tax cuts your caucus is insisting on, and is holding the administration hostage to are, by all accepted economic theory, the most ineffective stimulus, with individual tax cuts generating $1.03 economic activity for every $1 federal dollar spent. The business tax cuts that you insisted on generate $0.30 in economic activity for every $1 federal dollar spent. Contrast that weak tea with the spending programs that were cut out of the Senate package last night, such as $$ for food stamps – which generate the largest and most certain bang for the federal $$ spent at $1.73. (All forecasts above according to Moodies).
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It has been remarkable to listen to one Republican after another state that “this is not a stimulus bill, it is a spending bill.” Government spending IS stimulus, just as cash is money. That’s a basic principle of economics, literally found in the first couple of chapters in Econ 101. It is that basic.
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Weakening the stimulus bill to please your caucus, and it has been demonstrably weakened, increases the likelihood of economic catastrophe. I am a democrat, but I’ve always perceived you as being on the more reasonable side of the Republican caucus. Please do right by us and by our country by supporting a stimulus plan that is actually crafted to create jobs and economic activity.

cincy, be sure to take the time to watch this Moyers segment that directly addresses your point:
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NYU journalism professor and PressThink blogger Jay Rosen and political journalist and Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald explain to Bill Moyers that the press, once seen as an agent for change — the "fourth estate" checking power in America — has become thoroughly enmeshed in the establishment, and has a vested interest in preserving it.

I think also that a couple things should stand out with respect to Republican economic theories and reality.
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Now, if trickle down theory was really valid, we would have already seen at the minimum a slowing of the jobloss rate.
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Check this out:
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The GOP before bowing out, tossed 8.5 trillion dollars into a black box marked ‘rich’, the target group to recieve tax cuts in supply side econimics.
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Giving money to them directly is more efficient than giving them tax cuts.
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The amount of money given to them is so large (four times the nations’ current GDP), that if trickle down had any basis in reality, some of it would have filtered out of that black box down into the economy. In other words, the 8.5 trillion dollars represents a really hight tide and at least some boats should have been floated.
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Reality:
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Absolutely nothing happened. Nada, zip, zero, zilch, and as a matter of fact, as one can see, the jobloss rate accelerated.
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Therefore, that is unequivocal proof that trickledown doesn’t work.
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I’d like to see people who know the economy better than I do comment on this.
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The other is more tenuous, but obviously, the theory that the Free Market Can Do No Wrong has been proven wrong in any number of ways.

Thanx for the link…looks like good stuff. I don’t mind Olbermann’s bluster as it echoes my own and his anger is justified in almost every case. Also, let’s not forget, he was the first and has consistently covered the stories his colleagues ignored.
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Here’s one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers chiming in, he’s a youngster and it’s an interesting take from that generation:
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“American media, be it sports, gossip, celebrity, or politics, has for at least the past ten years (I am 24 so my sample size is rather small) presented each story of the day as something that is a really important, defining event. In turn, this has had the effect on me and many of my peers of the feeling that nothing is important. Which is why I have been so excited to see something truly important happen in my lifetime when Obama was elected. Now we have another truly important event, the economic crisis, and the media is still making micro events the story and missing the enormous picture. It truly is dumbfounding to me.”
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/02/micro-pundits-c.html
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You almost have to wonder if the apathy described above was the goal all along. That would be the most efficacious way of preserving the status quo.

The government has been fudging economic numbers to cover up our dire situation for some time, for instance if a company that makes radios adds a feature to a radio but doesn’t increase the price, that’s considered an increase in GDP. The employment numbers have also been fudged a lot and to illustrate, here’s more chart depression porn:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/

And this is the writing that was inscribed: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, and PARSIN. This is the interpretation of the matter: MENE, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; TEKEL, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; PERES, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_writing_on_the_wall

The best economic indices are those figured out in homes where they figure out things like how to eat, live, and play. Those who got a home, anyway. Play with the figures all you want in the village. The real test in beyond all the posturing and rhetoric.

I think I borrowed from Stalin who said that the death of an individual is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a statistic. They seem to subscribe to that philosophy in the village.

One more contribution, there are lies, damned lies, and then statistics.

You think that chart is ugly? Look at the user name WordPress gave me!

Anyway, per Paul Dirks’s request, I have overlaid population-adjusted employment figures for the ’82, ’90 and ’01 recessions on top of Speaker Pelosi’s chart. Here is my graph:

http://uncharted.org/frownland/pix/recession2.jpg

Please copy this file to your server if you want to republish it.

I took the base data from the BLS, and scaled it vertically. e.g. since the working population on 12/07, the last peak, was 25.8% higher than in 6/90, the peak before the ’90 recession, I scaled the unemployment figures for ’90 by 25.8% to produce a line which is proportionately comparable to the 2008 line.

I should mention again, as I did in my comment to the post below, that while the ’82 recession was economic “controlled demolition” (the Fed ran the prime rate up to 20% specifically to run unemployment up high enough to kill inflation and rescue bond-holders, then when they had achieved that goal, they lowered the prime rate and restarted the economy) the current recession is right outside of the Fed’s control, as the prime rate is as low as it can go. The Fed can do nothing, so we have a choice of 1.) a government stimulus plan or 2.) sitting on our hands a la Herbert Hoover and seeing when, if ever, the “invisible hand” will finally get around to fixing everything up for us. Obviously, 2.) is a perfectly satisfactory option, provided you yourself have a great huge trust fund to see you securely through the slump.

Also, it follows logically from the notion of scaling layoff numbers to the overall employment cohort, that if you get laid off from your job today, and subsequently lose your house and your car and end up living on the streets, it is clearly only 80% as bad as if you had become homeless in 1990, and a mere two-thirds as bad as if it had happened in 1982! Misery loves company, so count your blessings, jobless people!

g2-whatever:
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Nice chart. About what I expected after making the adjustments.
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Started buying silver…

g2–
nice chart. Could you by any chance add in the data from the “oil shock” recession of the seventies?
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IMHO, while Keysian economics is an appropriate response to “cyclical” recessions, its inadequate (and probably counter-productive) in dealing with recessions related to “non-cyclical” events. As I noted elsewhere, the results of Keynsian based stimuli in the late seventies was “stagflation”, and it took the artificially induced Reagan recession to “reset” the economy.
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And its my fear that in concentrating on “stimulus”, rather than a “reset”, that we’re repeating the same mistakes made in the second half of the 1970s. (The House spending package without the tax cuts is closer to the appropriate response — concentrate on spending directed at maintaining job levels and dealing with the impact of the recession on individuals through an enhanced social safety net.)

OK, plukasiak, I added the 1974 short-but-sharp slump, the revised chart is here:

http://uncharted.org/frownland/pix/recession3.jpg

Note that while job losses in the ’74 recession, caused by a single exogenous event, were steeper than the others on the chart, by the thirteenth month they were already half recovered-from. I imagine that a lot of the people laid off in 6/74 had got new jobs even before their unemployment benefits ran completely dry.

But I can sure tell you one thing, though, from my own dismal experience during that period – that was one Hell of a time for an inexperienced young person to be trying to enter the job market. I really pity teenagers who graduated from high school last year or this year. I hope when they get older and go to vote, that they remember clearly which party it was who screwed them so royally.

thers has an epic post: BREAKING: For Sensible Senate Moderates, Illiterate, Malnourished Children Are Keys to America’s Future

g2:
I wonder though, looking at the curve for the current one, it seems that the only way out of a conclusion that a minimum of 12 to 15 percent unemploment is in our near future is to model the current curve after the 1974 event.
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Obviously, it’s clear from your comments, that 1974 doesn’t even fit in with other recesssions that that comparison would be a long shot.
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What do you think about taking the curves you’ve created, and coming up with a common model for the relationship between the steepest portion of the curves to their minima and applying that to the current one (assume it’s at it’s steepest now)?

[...] before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing. Time’s readers quickly got to work debunking the graph for not taking into account the difference in population, though it seems that they ultimately concluded that this recession is the worst since 1974-1975, [...]