Stu Blog

Outside of my obvious pro-Fox News bias, ABC’s Jake Tapper seems to be doing most of the heavy lifting for the entire profession of journalism these days (along with a couple of others.) 

Yesterday he asked Robert Gibbs about a report that the Obama administration released in January—which showed what could happen to the unemployment rate if their world saving stimulus package was not passed (graph on page 5).  Here are the highlights:

1)    By their own estimation, the stimulus isn’t working as planned: The administration’s own estimates said that if the stimulus would pass, the unemployment rate would never rise above 8%.  Its peak would be around 7.9% around the end of the year.  Well…It’s at 8.5% already, and most economists seem to it’s getting worse before it gets better.

2)    By their own estimation, the stimulus might be making things worse:  The administration’s report showed that the unemployment rate would be about 8.1% right now if we had done NOTHING.  So, it’s either that the stimulus plan is actually making things worse, or the economy is significantly worse than they thought. Which brings me to #3 …   

3)    What does this do to their estimates?:  If their economic prognosis was this far off, this soon, what does this do to their deficit estimates 6 or 8 years out?  They already were very ugly, but doesn’t this make them far worse?

 Now, they do admit that there are high levels of uncertainty in their estimates–but this is the scenario that they’ve planned for.  It’s early proof that the charges of “rosy scenarios” were correct.

Now who’s ready for their universal healthcare estimates?

As much as I like to be hopeful on the economy, my 401k keeps stubbornly disagreeing with me.

(Not to mention that Glenn likes to remind me that my optimism was as well placed as that of Detroit Lions fans.  Of course, he doesn’t know sports so he uses some Woodrow Wilson reference that I pretend to understand.)

Looking at these projections of 55 economists--who say that GDP will be flat in 2009—I actually think I’m now even more pessimistic than them.  The most negative of all of them thinks we’ll only lose 2%?  Maybe they just think Obama will spend us out of it?  I’m not exactly sure. 

There are two interesting things I noticed on the jobs report today though.  First of all, news stories keep saying we’ve lost more jobs this year than any since 1945. 

In 1945 we lost about 2.8 million jobs, this year about 2.6 million.  But for those numbers to mean anything–don’t you have to adjust for population?  The US workforce is about 3.5 times bigger now than it was then.  For an equivilent amount of jobs to be lost as 1945, we’d have to lose around 10 million jobs in a year.  Again, not trying to sugar coat–but let’s keep things in perspective.  It can (and may) get much much worse.

The other thing I find fascinating about this downturn–is the unemployment line is quickly becoming a bit like the audience of a Jason Statham movie.  It’s all dudes.

Since December 2007, about 2.4 million men have lost their jobs, while less than 500,000 women have lost theirs.  Where is the gender equality??!  

About 82% of the jobs lost, have been jobs that guys were doing.    

Why?  Manufacturing and construction, which are 70% and 88% male respectively, have been the jobs going away.  While women are dominating fields like education and health care that are doing much better.  

I guess we all knew women would eventually take over the world.  Took ‘em long enough.