Saturday, February 07, 2009

The Downward Slide

This chart on the unemployment trend is from Nancy Pelosi's office and shows how steeply the U. S. economy is falling during the current recession.
--
The top two lines illustrate what relatively mild recessions look like. The blue line is the 1990 recession in which employment losses stopped falling after 11 months and totaled 1.6 million jobs. During the 2001 recession, the economy lost most of its 2.7 million jobs during the first 12 months and then sank more gradually for another 15 months.
--
The difference between the current recession and the other two is stark. Where the sharpest rise in job losses were over after 12 months in the previous two recessions, this recession has seen an acceleration in job losses after 12 months.
--
This is one reason why a major stimulus package is necessary now.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm especially concerned with the efforts of moderate Democrats and the Republicans to trim down the bill. I work for a company that depends on subscription fees from public libraries, and the talk is that $200 million is going to be stripped from library funding. Everyone working for my company (over 2200 people) is getting pretty nervous. Without that funding, jobs will be lost.

Ric Caric said...

I hope it works out for your company. I checked CNN's cut list and didn't see anything on public libraries. But the $40 billion for stabilizing state budgets was cut and it's easy to see states as cutting funding for libraries when they cut their budgets.