U.S. Budget and Economy

On June 13th, Mitt Romney policy director Lanhee Chen posted a blog on the Romney web site titled "Taxed and Spent: American Workers Suffering Under Obama" . Following is the first paragraph: President Obama’s policies have failed the American people. And nowhere has this failure been more evident than in this Administration’s handling of our nation’s economy. In the month that President Obama was inaugurated, the unemployment rate was 7.8%, the national debt stood at $10.6 trillion, and the average price for a gallon of gas was $1.83. Today, in the third year of his presidency, unemployment has ballooned to 9.1%, the national debt tops $14 trillion, and Americans are paying double—$3.70 a gallon—for gas. Technically, the numbers appear to be correct. This page on the Federal Reserve web site shows that the employment rate was 7.8% on January 1st, 2009 and is 9.1% as of May 1st, 2011. However, note that the unemployment rate reached 9.4% in May, just 4 months after Oba...

The U.S. Budget for fiscal year 2012 was released on February 14, 2011. As in prior years, it included the Analytical Perspectives which contains a section on the long-run budget outlook. The following graph shows the outlook for federal receipts, outlays, and debt held by the public as projected by this section. The actual numbers and sources for this and the following graph can be found at this link . As can be seen, receipts are projected to rise and spending is projected to drop over the next 10 years, causing the deficit to narrow to 3.1 percent of GDP by 2020. However, outlays are then projected to begin a steady rise, causing the deficit to reach 12.3 percent of GDP by 2085. This is projected to cause the debt held by the public to rise to 239.9 percent of GDP. This is more than double the prior high of 108.7 percent of GDP reached in 1946, at the end of World War II. Still, this is a major improvement over the projections from the prior budget. The dashed lines in the a...

On June 3rd, an article titled "Nearly 1 in 3 Unemployed Out of Work More Than a Year" was posted on the WSJ (Wall Street Journal) Blogs. Following is the second paragraph: Even as some people are re-entering the work force, some of the extremely long-term unemployed may be giving up. The number of people unemployed for more than a year dropped a bit last month to 4.006 million from 4.076 million. They now represent 32.6% of the unemployed. I found this especially interesting as I've never seen data for the number of people unemployed for more than a year. The following graph shows unemployment divided up into the four durations commonly released by the BLS (Bureau of Labor Statistics): Links to the actual data used to create this graph can be found at this link and on the BLS web site . As can be seen, the longest duration is for workers unemployed for 27 weeks (about a half year) or more. And, although the number of such workers reached record levels in early 2010...