I was never much of a math student, but if you put something into a nifty graph for me, I can usually get the gist. Here’s a collection of great economics graphs that, taken together, paint a picture of what’s going on with the U.S. economy.
(Click each graph for a link to the blog post or government site where I found the chart.)
This recession that began in 2007 (and really struck in 2009) has not resulted in a recovery like our previous three recessions.
Last week the U.S. Department of Commerce revised its earlier estimations of economic change during the recession. In short, they just found out that 2008 and 2009 were even worse than they thought at the time. It turns out that economists have a habit of optomistic projections during recessions.
The real estate bubble has been widely blamed for the recession. But if you bought your home in 1991 instead of 2004, you’re in much better shape today.
The destruction of real estate in the past decade has been absolutely brutal for minority homeowners, who are more likely than whites to have bought a house recently.
Whites vs. minorities isn’t the only way our society is unequal. Even our “middle class tax cuts” overwhelmingly benefit the rich.
And our rich already get a pretty amazing deal: They benefit from being at the top of the richest consumer society in human history while paying low taxes compared to rich Americans in the 1950s or rich foreigners today. Oh, and while the rich have seen their marginal tax rates drop like a drunk hobo who’s had a few too many bottles of Thunderbird, your taxes have only gone down a tiny bit.
The Bush Tax Cuts, which are the ultimate in regressive tax favors for the rich, were supposed to help the “job creators” create jobs. Somehow that didn’t work.
The level of “housing starts” (new houses being built) is basically in “holy shit we are screwed territory.” The construction industry is currently more crippled than Terri Schiavo.
No one is building new houses because another great stat — household formation — is at levels not seen since the Great Depression. Basically, when the economy is bad, people move in with relatives and they put off marriages.
And while the country’s economic growth has slugged along like a Crasstalk commenter who just munched a handful of vicodin, we’ve been spending insane amounts of money on health care.
If you want to know where your tax dollars are going, don’t bother whining about “earmarks” or foreign aid. Your baby boomer parents are going to suck up literally ever single dollar of federal expenditures ever for the next 30 years.
But don’t worry. The latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report says you can always find a job in a modern, high-growth industry like “Support Activities for Mining.”
