MORE: How Bad Is It?

Depressing numbers. And after watching congress the last two weeks it is hard not to be more depressed.

The modification to rexpress the drop as a percentage of workforce should be pretty straightforward. I'd love to see the charts that his reworked numbers yield.

Even with the corrections, I don't think the chart will look that much different.
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The country has only grown in size a few percent since 2001 and maybe a little more than 10% since 1990, which will have the affect of making the 1990 curve look somewhat deeper but the 2001 curve won't change much at all.
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It's a great effort though, KT.

Can anyone really beleive you can just throw tax cuts at the next Depression?

http://www.political-buzz.com/

I know we want to find some way to make this not seem as bad as it is but the truth is when you think about it its probably worse. What we can't know is how many people who were into retirement have lost their savings and are now struggling and might have to go back to work to survive. Then you have places like California putting people on furloughs so technically they are still employed but they aren't getting paid what they are used to which means they will have their budget stretched to the limit. This economic crisis hits so many people in so many different ways that I really think the hard data is only showing the tip of the iceberg somewhat.

What 53_3 said, which is more or less what I said last night. Also worth noting that the graph showed signs of the job losses bottoming out or at least declining in the previous recessions, while the trend line in this one is accelerating downwards.
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You all might want to watch this bit of brutal honesty from Maddow: "Republicans may not like it but the way to create jobs fast is through spending. It matters when you're wrong. A whopping proportion of the Republican rhetoric about stimulus is wrong - total economic bull puckey. It's time to take the radical step of privileging correct information over incorrect information."
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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/29062335#29062335
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Wouldn't it be nice if, given the horror of that graph KT posted last night, the rest of the media chose to "take the radical step of privileging correct information over incorrect information."
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Just a thought.

wvng
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Of particular interest was Rachel Maddow's reporting on food stamps which according to Moodys is the MOST stimulative tool that we have in our tool box. You get almost two dollars of stimulus for ever 1 dollar put into food stamps. But what did they cut out of the "compromise" bill? Money for food stamps.

In case you missed it, ex wingnut John Cole made a useful observation on bi-partisanship yesterday:
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I really don't understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.
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Reminds me of David Sedaris on undecided voters last fall.

I mentioned it last night, but worth noting again and highly recommended. Moyers had a superb segment last night on the beltway culture and dysfunction that allows, even promotes, the failure to "take the radical step of privileging correct information over incorrect information."
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NYU journalism professor and PressThink blogger Jay Rosen and political journalist and Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald explain to Bill Moyers that the press, once seen as an agent for change — the "fourth estate" checking power in America — has become thoroughly enmeshed in the establishment, and has a vested interest in preserving it.

By the way, now they are saying that Obama is fear mongering like Bush but I would like to point out something. He isn't using some "secret" information when he talks about the economy. He is using the predictions of economists across the spectrum. Anything he is predicting will happen is the same thing Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman is predicting, the same thing the CBO is predicting and even most Republicans are also predicting. Thats not fear mongering, thats telling the truth. Anybody who thinks he is just bullsh*tting about the job losses we are looking at if we do nothing are probably the same ass holes who claimed for 10 months that we weren't really in a recession and or "the fundamentals of our economy are strong". Hell if anything he probably isn't really revealing just how bad it is. I really hope at some point journalists end their attempts to try make everything President Obama does comparable to George Bush. But I won't be holding my breath.

sgw - yes, that might help a poor person in addition to helping the economy. Heavens.
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One of the points in the Moyers segment last night was that the media filters out any discourse that challenges their world view. Which is why an Amy Goodman will never be allowed in discussion panels because she would eviscerate false talking points, when the accepted protocol is to nod politely no matter what is said.
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btw, still waiting for Maddow to invite Goodman on to discuss media dysfunction. That would be a great segment.

I wish BHO January 2009 would have a chat with BHO February 2008
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McMANUS: Senator Obama, one other thing both of your health insurance proposals have in common is they would cost billions of dollars in new spending, and both of you have proposed raising taxes on a lot of Americans to pay for that and for other proposals. Well, now, you know what's going to happen this fall in the general election campaign. The Republicans are going to call you "tax-and-spend" liberal Democrats, and that's a charge that's been effective in the past. How are you going to counter that charge?

Obama responded: "I don't think the Republicans are going to be in a real strong position to argue fiscal responsibility, when they've added $4 or $5 trillion worth of national debt. You know, I am happy to have that argument."

What we can't know is how many people who were into retirement have lost their savings and are now struggling and might have to go back to work to survive.
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my guess is that relatively few retired people "lost their savings", because the financial advice that people get when they retire is to get out of the stock market, and into low-risk interest bearing investments.
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That is not to say that a lot of them won't have to "tighten their belts", just that relatively few have been "wiped out."
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A far bigger problem probably exists with people who are approaching retirement age, and who didn't get out of the stock market -- and made plans (and took on debt) based on portfolios that are now worth far less. These folks are in deep doo-doo, because their fixed expenses in retirement will require them to liquidate their assets too quickly.

sgw: "That's not fear mongering, that's telling the truth. "
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Yes, but to state that you utterly fail to draw the false equivalencies that prove Obama is just as bad as Bush, now that Bush is gone and the media feels free to talk about how bad he was - except when they are giving Bush people (Card, Cheney, Gonzales) free access to spout whatever self-serving insanity they chose to spout.
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Anyone find a clip from yesterday of Sanchez and Boehlert yet?

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Well, thanks for the cheerful Saturday morning news, Karen!
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(>.<) - ouch!

What p-luk said. But, of course, any retirees who were vested in pension plans that have been wiped-out are wiped-out.

PNNTO
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You must not have seen the new radio address for today.
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sgw - you are the man!

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wvng: Anyone find a clip from yesterday of Sanchez and Boehlert yet?
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Transcript here, about halfway down the page. You can get the Daily Show portion from the Daily Show website.

wvng: Thanks for the Sedaris link! That made my morning! (Wish I'da seen that link in October when my friends and neighbors were all crinkling their noses because they felt the chicken was not cooked thoroughly enough!)
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KT: The scary part about the curve is that the job loss rate is not decreasing. We're in for another 2,3, 4? months of 500K jobs cuts. A fast acting stimulus is what we need...
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...is there any polling data out there tracking industry responses to the questions:
1) How many jobs can you avoid cutting if your company gets a tax cut?
2) How many jobs can you avoid cutting if your company gets a contract from the government to build (something)?
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I'd like to think that questions like these could help counter the GOP misinformation machine.

sgw - I just watched the whole thing. M ind boggling. Does the phrase "blinded by ideology" come to mind? I guess one of the core problems with the republican party is that they have mostly purged people from serving who are not ideologues, who can think outside of the constraints of a narrow ideological box.
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Brings this to mind:
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In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might “argue back” against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same “backfire effect” when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration's stance on stem cell research.

SG-uh, thanks? Coburn is certainly a leading light for the republicans.

Without getting mired in details, its safe to say that the Stock market drop has reduced the number of people who can safely remain out of the workforce.

pluk
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You are right in the sense of what "should" be happening with retirees. However for a very brief period I worked in financial services. And what I found was that there is a class and wealth discrimination that goes with advising retirees. You have to remember, a lot of the middle class to lower middle class workers never have a regular financial advisor. The reason being managing an individual retirement account normally doesn't bring in the advisor much money. So what happens is that these people set up their retirement accounts initially and then just let it go. Not all of them are highly educated or financially savy. Besides that even when they go looking for advice when an advisor sees they have a retirement account many of them look to "churn" the retiree. That means making them pull money out of the retirement account to put into a different investment vehicle that won't substantially help them but will help the advisor by earning them a bonus on the transaction. It happens a lot more than you would think. And the thing you have to remember is that this is one of those rare times when the stock market is low AND the bond markets aren't doing that great either. I have to admit that I am somewhat happy that I left that job when I did because while we were taught not to churn because its illegal we were also given a wink and a nod about what we should do when dealing with retirees.