| Are the Job Numbers Growing? (AFTER THE BIG CRASH OF 2008-2009) (SOURCE OF DATA FOR JOB NUMBERS) BACK TO JOBS PAGE BACK TO HOME PAGE |
| . Where they come from is -- THE US DEPARTMENT OF LABOR GO TO http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?ce Then check the box(es) next to the kind of data you want and click Retrieve Data. I used Total Nonfarm Employment Total Private Employment Government Employment ONCE YOU GET TO THE DATA PAGES, YOU CAN SELECT THE YEARS YOU WANT TO LOOK AT AND TELL THE SITE TO DRAW GRAPHS FOR YOU. THERE IS ALSO AN OPTION TO DOWNLOAD THE DATA AS A SPREADSHEET. THAT IS WHAT I DID, AND THEN I USED EXCEL TO DRAW MY OWN GRAPHS. CONTINUE ON FOR SOME SHORT, THUMBNAIL DESCRIPTIONS GO BACK TO THE MAIN JOBS PAGE FOR A LONGER LOOK. |
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| Each Blue Dot: Private Sector Jobs for a month. See us falling with the big crash? |
| But those private jobs are going up about as fast under Obama as under Bush. They just have not had as much time, and they had to start lower. But what about public employment? |
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| Public Employment went up under Bush and down under Obama. It pretty much had to go down under Obama. Just look at how the recession cut into revenue. |
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| A closer look at public employment going down during the Obama years, up to mid 2012. In contrast to private employment, these numbers just kept sliding. |
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| So I just got to wondering: What would the job creation numbers look like if public employment had gone up under Obama as rapidly as it did under Bush? |
| I had made these graphs on the Excel spreadsheet using Labor Dept. data. Excel has a function that will allow you to draw a line that goes up at the same average rate as a bunch of points. So I used it on the green dots from the Bush years and got the black straight line in this figure. Then I put that line on the first green point of the Obama administration and extended it. That gave me those red dots, the monthly public job numbers if they had grown under Obama as fast as they had under Bush. |
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| So what did I do that for? I wanted to see what this one looked like. The yellow dots are the real monthly job numbers in which the public figures detract from the private ones. |
| The red dots are what the total jobs numbers would look like if the public jobs had gone up as I imagined in the previous figure. |
| I WONDER WHY WE THINK GOVERNMENT HAS BEEN IN SOME UNCONTROLLED EXPANSION UNDER OBAMA? AND I WONDER WHY WE THINK THAT HE HAS BEEN LOSING JOBS INSTEAD OF CREATING THEM? (OF COURSE, I HOPE CONGRESS DOESN'T STOP THE GROWTH BY INSISTING ON SOME FISCAL CLIFF.) |