Showing posts with label Employment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Employment. Show all posts
Monday, February 4, 2019
Sunday, August 13, 2017
Random charts - jobs
"The first graph shows the change in private sector payroll jobs from when each president took office until the end of their term(s). Presidents Carter and George H.W. Bush only served one term. Mr. G.W. Bush (red) took office following the bursting of the stock market bubble, and left during the bursting of the housing bubble. Mr. Obama (blue) took office during the financial crisis and great recession. There was also a significant recession in the early '80s right after Mr. Reagan (yellow) took office. There was a recession towards the end of President G.H.W. Bush (purple) term, and Mr Clinton (light blue) served for eight years without a recession...
A big difference between the presidencies has been public sector employment... The public sector grew during Mr. Carter's term (up 1,304,000), during Mr. Reagan's terms (up 1,414,000), during Mr. G.H.W. Bush's term (up 1,127,000), during Mr. Clinton's terms (up 1,934,000), and during Mr. G.W. Bush's terms (up 1,744,000 jobs. However the public sector declined significantly while Mr. Obama was in office (down 268,000 jobs).
During the first six months of Mr. Trump's term, the economy has gained 47,000 public sector jobs.."
Sunday, October 9, 2016
Monday, September 5, 2016
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Friday, July 4, 2014
Saturday, April 19, 2014
Random charts - jobs
Click to enlarge
"The best private sector job growth was under Clinton (both terms) followed by Reagan's 2nd term and Carter (Obama's 2nd term will probably be close...). The largest increase in public sector jobs was during Reagan's 2nd term...."
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Random charts - child health
Source: Time to Act: Investing in the Health of Our Children and Communities. Recommendations From the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America (120-pg PDF)
"In 2008, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) convened the Commission to Build a Healthier Americato help us find better ways to improve the health of our nation. In their search for solutions, the Commissioners found that there is much more to health than health care and that where we live, learn, work, and play profoundly influence our health..."
Their recommendations?
"Recommendation 1:
Make investing in America’s youngest children a high priority. This will require a significant shift in spending priorities and major new initiatives to ensure that families and communities build a strong foundation in the early years for a lifetime of good health.
Recommendation 2:
Fundamentally change how we revitalize neighborhoods, fully integrating health into community development.
Recommendation 3:
The nation must take a much more health-focused approach to health care financing and delivery. Broaden the mindset, mission, and incentives for health professionals and health care institutions beyond treating illness to helping people lead healthy lives."
Saturday, January 4, 2014
Random chart - unemployment
Source: Week of January 5th
"... The following graph shows the percentage of payroll jobs lost during post WWII recessions through November. The economy has added 8.1 million private sector jobs since employment bottomed in February 2010 (7.45 million total jobs added including all the public sector layoffs). There are still almost 760 thousand fewer private sector jobs now than when the recession started in 2007..."
Friday, August 16, 2013
Saturday, March 9, 2013
Random chart - jobs
Source: Summary for Week ending March 8th. "...This shows the depth of the recent employment recession - worse than any
other post-war recession - and the relatively slow recovery due to the
lingering effects of the housing bust and financial crisis..."
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Saturday, September 1, 2012
Sunday, May 27, 2012
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Calculating program impacts
It can be very difficult to forecast the impact of economic legislation before it is passed, and just as hard to measure this even after the passage of time... So, for example, discussions of what was achieved by The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) range all over the map - from Republicans claiming that it has exacerbated the economic problems of the country, to Democrats who insist that it was very successful in generating employment and economic activity and that the situation would be much worse had it not been passed, to positions in between....
A CBO report, 'Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output from October 2011 Through December 2011', speaks to the methodologies used by The Congressional Budget Office to estimate the legislation's impact.
The first methodology is driven by the legislation itself... It required those who received over $25,000 as a result of the legislation to report on a quarterly basis a myriad of details about the projects funded and their impacts. If you summed them up this provided numbers of people employed, which could then be attributed to the effects of the legislation.
A CBO report, 'Estimated Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on Employment and Economic Output from October 2011 Through December 2011', speaks to the methodologies used by The Congressional Budget Office to estimate the legislation's impact.
The first methodology is driven by the legislation itself... It required those who received over $25,000 as a result of the legislation to report on a quarterly basis a myriad of details about the projects funded and their impacts. If you summed them up this provided numbers of people employed, which could then be attributed to the effects of the legislation.
The CBO report points out the deficiencies of this methodology:
"However, the reported number of jobs funded is not a comprehensive measure of ARRA’s effect on overall employment or even of those provisions of ARRA for which recipients’ reports are required. The actual impact could, in principle, be significantly larger or smaller than the number of jobs reported. If, for example, recipients’ reports include employment that would have occurred without ARRA, the impact on employment suggested by the reports could be too great. Some people whose employment was attributed to ARRA might have worked on other activities in the absence of the law...
Conversely, the reported figure could be too low because the reporting requirement is limited to primary and secondary recipients of funds and thus excludes lower level recipients, such as subcontractors hired by a main subcontractor. Thus, if expenditures under ARRA led to increases in employment among lower-level subcontractors and vendors, those effects would be missed by the reports.
Recipients’ reports also do not include indirect effects that could increase or decrease the impact on employment. Among those effects are potential declines in employment in other businesses or economic sectors as demand shifts toward the recipients of ARRA funding— a phenomenon often called the “crowding out” effect of government policies.
Conversely, spending under ARRA could lead to higher employment at companies that are not directly connected to that spending...
Finally, the recipients’ reports reflect only about one-fifth of the total amount of spending increases or tax reductions that are attributable to ARRA’s provisions. The reports cover direct government purchases of goods and services, grants and loans to private entities, and some grants to states and localities, but they do not cover tax cuts or increases in transfer payments to individuals..."
"However, the reported number of jobs funded is not a comprehensive measure of ARRA’s effect on overall employment or even of those provisions of ARRA for which recipients’ reports are required. The actual impact could, in principle, be significantly larger or smaller than the number of jobs reported. If, for example, recipients’ reports include employment that would have occurred without ARRA, the impact on employment suggested by the reports could be too great. Some people whose employment was attributed to ARRA might have worked on other activities in the absence of the law...
Conversely, the reported figure could be too low because the reporting requirement is limited to primary and secondary recipients of funds and thus excludes lower level recipients, such as subcontractors hired by a main subcontractor. Thus, if expenditures under ARRA led to increases in employment among lower-level subcontractors and vendors, those effects would be missed by the reports.
Recipients’ reports also do not include indirect effects that could increase or decrease the impact on employment. Among those effects are potential declines in employment in other businesses or economic sectors as demand shifts toward the recipients of ARRA funding— a phenomenon often called the “crowding out” effect of government policies.
Conversely, spending under ARRA could lead to higher employment at companies that are not directly connected to that spending...
Finally, the recipients’ reports reflect only about one-fifth of the total amount of spending increases or tax reductions that are attributable to ARRA’s provisions. The reports cover direct government purchases of goods and services, grants and loans to private entities, and some grants to states and localities, but they do not cover tax cuts or increases in transfer payments to individuals..."
So, the CBO turns to a second methodology. In this case it grouped all the ARRA provisions into a number of categories (see chart below) and then applied the historical "multipliers" (using a 'low' and a 'high' estimate for each category based on a consensus amongst economists) to the various expenditures at the various dates that they occurred... The output estimates thus obtained were translated into estimates of effects on employment and unemployment, etc.
This second methodology also has pluses and minuses... Per the CBO report:
"... A key advantage of the model-based approach used in this analysis is the ability to provide estimates of the total effects throughout the economy of the government spending, transfer payments, and tax cuts resulting from ARRA...
A key disadvantage of the model-based approach is the considerable uncertainty about many of the economic relationships that are important in the modeling. Because economists differ on which analytical approaches provide the most convincing evidence about such relationships, they can reach different conclusions about those relationships... For those reasons, CBO provides ranges of estimates of ARRA’s economic effects that are intended to encompass most economists’ views and thereby reflect the uncertainty involved in such estimates..."
However, unlike economists, most politicians don't go for estimates, ranges, or nuance! So, if the CBO estimates that between 0.7 million to 3.3 million jobs may have been created by ARRA in 2010, the administration will tout the 3.3 million figure!
"... A key advantage of the model-based approach used in this analysis is the ability to provide estimates of the total effects throughout the economy of the government spending, transfer payments, and tax cuts resulting from ARRA...
A key disadvantage of the model-based approach is the considerable uncertainty about many of the economic relationships that are important in the modeling. Because economists differ on which analytical approaches provide the most convincing evidence about such relationships, they can reach different conclusions about those relationships... For those reasons, CBO provides ranges of estimates of ARRA’s economic effects that are intended to encompass most economists’ views and thereby reflect the uncertainty involved in such estimates..."
However, unlike economists, most politicians don't go for estimates, ranges, or nuance! So, if the CBO estimates that between 0.7 million to 3.3 million jobs may have been created by ARRA in 2010, the administration will tout the 3.3 million figure!
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Friday, June 3, 2011
Random chart
Source: Wages, Expectations, and Prospects for Inflation."... the University of Michigan’s Survey of Consumers also asks participants about their future income prospects. They are asked: “By about what percent do you expect your (family) income to increase during the next 12 months?” Individuals who feel confident about their ability to demand higher wages in response to rising prices would likely expect rising family income. In stable economic conditions, individuals typically expect their family’s income to roughly keep pace with inflation. However, about midway through the last recession, the median expectation plummeted from around 2.0 percent to near zero, and it has continued to hover at an all-time low of 0.2 percent. If inflation were to increase at about 2 percent over the next year and the income expectation materialized, that would mean the median individual’s real income would fall..."
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