Biggest Tax Increase in American History

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Driving Us Crazy

My latest 'toon'...


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Hat-tip to Evan Coyne Maloney at Brain-Terminal...

Obama - Jedi Master

Nine Years Ago Today

Never Forget

The Forgotten Man

US Capitol Tour with David Barton

Hat-tip to Heirborn Ranger...

Stimulus Spending And Job Growth: Update 15

Well, it's that time again. Time to update Obama's stimulus-driven job creation results. Let's look at the latest picture. In August, there was a net loss of 54,000 jobs, but this job loss number was due in large part to the layoff of the last 114,000 temporary census workers. Again, since I did not include the temporary census workers in earlier job increases, I cannot then include the losses here. Therefore, in the graph below, I have discounted the census job losses and allowed for a net gain of 60,000 jobs. The unemployment rate bumped up to 9.6%.

Barack Obama said his stimulus package would create approximately 4 million "new" jobs over two years. In order to create 4 million jobs in 24 months, the Obama administration would have had to create approximately 166,667 jobs per month to reach his target, assuming linear job growth. That scenario is shown as violet in the following graph.

I developed a curve showing what I thought might be a more "Likely" scenario -- plotted as light blue in the following graph. As you can see from the graph, the actual trend was somewhat worse than I had predicted -- plotted as yellow and red. However, the trend has generally followed the trajectory I had originally envisioned. Obama's "Summer of Recovery" has been virtually non-existent. Since May of this year (Month 15), job growth has been anemic at best.


I have revised the June and July job figures upwards according to the latest data from the US Dept of Labor. Now, instead of having to create 166,667 new jobs per month to reach his original target of 4 million new jobs, President Obama needs to create 989,500 jobs per month -- in order to make up for the 2 million jobs that were lost since the stimulus bill was signed.

I am sorry to once again report that I was not one of those fortunate 60,000 who found work in August. However, I am happy to report that I have seen more activity in the last 2 weeks than I have in the last 11-1/2 months. Yes, I will soon be unemployed for a year. It's amazing how quickly that time went by. Perhaps it will not be much longer now.