scaremongering

So I happened to come across this graph from Speaker Pelosi's website.  It represents the aggregate job losses from the point at which employment started to decline ("the peak") for the past two recessions and for our current recession.  At first glance it looks pretty scary - job losses going off the cliff.  But a moment's thought reveals that this graph represents an invalid comparison, as our economy now is bigger than what it was in 1991, or even in 2001.  So comparing total job losses makes no sense - losing 500,000 jobs is much worse if it is lost from an economy with a total employment of 50 million, as opposed to 150 million.  Really what should be compared is the percentage of total employment from the peak.

So I dug through the BLS statistics and I came up with this graph.  Still looks pretty scary, even compared on a percentage basis.  But we all know already that this recession is worse than the previous two.  How about comparing it to the 1981-82 and 1974-76 recessions?  So when I did that, I got this graph.

Not quite so scary now, eh?  In terms of job loss, our current recession is about as severe as the 1974-76 recession, and not even as bad as the 1981-82 recession.  In fact if you look carefully at the data, by this point in the 1981-82 recession, jobs continued to be lost for 4 more months until things started to turn around.  And at least according to one source, "most professional economic forecasters are now predicting a moderate recession that will last until the middle of 2009" - which is, coincidentally, about 4 months from now.

Bottom line: Nancy's scary graph notwithstanding, we aren't on the verge of disaster.  Don't let the Democrats' fearmongering get to you.