If you wanted a reasonable criticism of the Heritage graph, you should have asked why they excluded postal employees, which have dropped by 100,000 since 2007. That was the first thing I noticed. I checked it out, and it turns out there wasn’t a choice, since the BLS numbers exclude them. Don’t ask me why.

At bottom, this is about two sets of basic principles for governing a country as far as economics is concerned. Which ones actually create real robust growth and which ones create stagnation, like the Great Depression which rolled on at 15 percent-plus unemployment for a decade, or a downward spiral, like much of Europe now.

At this point, anybody calling for more government spending as the solution, in the face of trillion-dollar deficits, is nuts.

Delusions aside, there is no level of taxation on the “rich” that can make up that shortfall. The math has been done, much of it right in front of you. Confiscating the entire gross income of the top 1 percent would cover just the deficit for one year.

The real answer to our economic problems is to take politicians who think “profit” and “private sector” are dirty words and get them out of office ASAP.

Yeah Tim Geithner is personally cooking the books for the entire treasury department, the CBO and the BLS, but the heritage foundation IS a realiable source? Please.

Actually study the graph on Hoover. It was 1930, after the election and the stock market crash that he called for fiscal austerity. Look what it did to the economy. Look what stimulus spending did.

And why is it important to start those first graphs at an earlier date? The entire point of the graphs is to show what the economy was like the day Obama took office and what it is like now. Right? How is the economy in 2001-2007 relevant to the economy he faced when he took office Jan 2009?

The only thing I can think of is you simply don’t want to address the point (Obama’s term) so you try to reframe it into how great things were 2001-07.

You’ve got your soft pink mythology and you don’t want me peeing in the soup.

Of course Timothy Geithner has no axe to grind. Of course it was Hoover calling for balanced budgets in the election of 1929. Of course the Heritage Foundation is not a valid source of data, but blogger Glenn Melancon is.

Do you realize that if you were actually refuting my point, that graph would go ten or twenty years earlier than 1929? It’s exactly the same damn graph gimmick the presentation pulled.

Well, for a few posts there, I deluded myself.

“Any political leader could display numbers after a massive crash that are better than the numbers during the crash.”

Would that include Herbert Hoover? The “austerity is good for the depressed economy” president?

The two graphs start exactly at the beginning of the crash. Even an employment growth chart that did go back to the beginning of 2007 would have shown positive growth in ten of those months.

Again, who gives a shit? This is about what Obama inherited, not what things were like just before the GOP drove the economy off a cliff.

The Heritage graph discounted census employment. As far as “bias” is concerned, keep in mind you introduced excerpts from a presentation by the Obama executive branch on why Obama should be re-elected.

Every chart in that presentation was from the Treasury Dept or the CBO. Reliable unbiased sources. The heritage foundation is a partisan think tank that cranks out misleading data on a constant basis. Kind of like what you do here only on a far larger scale.

When unemployment rates were 25 percent during the Great Crash in 1932, it was pretty easy for Roosevelt to brag about his “lower” unemployment numbers, even though they never got below 14 percent until 1941. For a good time, go look up the unemployment rates during the 1920s, particularly during the recession of 1921.

The two graphs start exactly at the beginning of the crash. Even an employment growth chart that did go back to the beginning of 2007 would have shown positive growth in ten of those months.

The Heritage graph discounted census employment. As far as “bias” is concerned, keep in mind you introduced excerpts from a presentation by the Obama executive branch on why Obama should be re-elected.

As for the third graph, you complain about cooked numbers and then bring out a graph from the champs of cooked books, the heritage foundation. What did you say about end points? Like the way they end their graph during the census?

Not surprised you can’t stomach reading and understanding the rest of the data.

If you are going to be fair, ignore those low points and draw lines straight across the tops of those graphs, ignoring the collapse fueled by the disastrous practices of GWB. That looks bad and gives the right impression. Trust me, someone will suggest just that.

The Romney’s of the world, the folks who make enormous sums by manipulating paper and producing nothing, had the US on the ropes. Obama, like Clinton before him, has rescued the US from complete disaster. I wonder how many of these we have left.

The secret is where you drop your endpoints. As just one example, the first chart clips off a stretch of 47 months of positive private job growth between the summer of 2003 and the summer of 2007. Except for the two-month negative blip in the summer of 2007, it would have been 54 months, taking it to the beginning of Geithner’s chart.

In the second chart, GDP growth, the left end clips off a record of constant positive GDP growth between the fourth quarter of 2001 and the fourth quarter of 2007. Six years without a negative number, with an average across that time of about 3 percent.

The third graph, showing how flat government employment is, is a bit more tricky. “Government employment” includes state and local governments, paid for mostly by state and local taxes. If you crack Federal employment loose from that figure, it looks a bit different.

Not for nothing do ten of the fifteen richest counties in the United States adjoin Washington DC.

It would take me a long time to plow through this whole thing, but I don’t think this is going to work.

Unemployment is still over 8 percent (and expected to stay over that number for the next two years at least), gasoline is at $4.00 a gallon and climbing, deficits are still running over a trillion dollars every year, and Obama’s own budget shows deficits in the $700 billion range for the next ten years, floating back up to the trillion mark at the end of that period. Remember all the noises made here about Bush’s record $450 billion deficit year? And that’s making several assumptions, including killing the Bush tax cuts (still in effect, by the way), slashing Medicare doctor payments, multiple new new taxes, and a unrealistically robust growth rate. Federal spending is planned to stay at 22 percent of GDP or higher. Forever.

The gross Federal debt now is about $15.5 trillion (as of March 1), comfortably over the 100-percent-of-GDP mark. Obama, in one term, has already added as much to the debt as Bush did in two terms (and that was no small change), and he’s got many months to go.

P.S. refreshing to see some hard data here, even if some of it is “cooked” a bit for the presentation. You are correct that the sources are good ones. Thanks!