Fear Mongering and Liberal Math

Take a look at this video clip of Nancy Pelosi fear-mongering. I don't want to make this a political blog site, but this is just the kind of idiotic fear-mongering that causes dangerous and expensive rushed decisions. If you want to give the Madame Speaker the benefit of the doubt, she made the same statement in a Chris Wallace interview on January 18th. Scare me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me...

"Every month that we do no have an economic recovery package, 500 million Americans lose their jobs" - Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi

I always thought there were only somewhere on the order of 300-305M Americans at the present time (at least according to the CIA and Census Bureau). So for her statement to be true, if we delay just one month, we would have to have 100% employment rate (that is, everyone has at least one job), and 83% of those people would have to have two jobs (again, I don't think this is true). Finally, in that first month, we would all have to lose our 1 or 2 jobs, that is 5/6ths of the jobs would have to be lost (I guess that includes her too, hopefully). Actually strictly speaking even that wouldn't work since she said 500M Americans would lose their jobs, not 500M American jobs would be lost. Semantics aside, so what would happen the next month? There would be no more American jobs to lose.... or is she assuming that we all have 4, or 6, or 8 jobs so we can stretch this out to 2, or 3 or 4 months?!?

Liberal math does not compute! Maybe that's why so many of the democrats in power have had recently-surfaced serious tax evasion problems. These are not little errors here and there, but often multi-year spanning, tens to hundreds of thousands of dollar "accidents" or "mistakes" made by the likes of Daschle, Geithner, Murphy, and Rangle. Tax evasion is another topic for another time though. I want to discuss something else while we are still on the sub-topic of unemployment.

Unemployment Timeline

Check out this unemployment timeline. Here are some interesting observations:

• The timeline does not have unemployment data points for the Great Depression years, but estimates were 23-25% for several years. So everyone comparing this, finally official, recession to the Great Depression is slapping the face those who survived through the 1930s. In fact in the '80s recession and many years before it had unemployment in excess of 10.0% (we are estimating that the current 2009 rate is ~7.5%), so what we are in is not even as bad as the '80s and other year s with regard to employment.
• For a lot of the 1990s and 2000s the unemployment rate was below 6.00. These years included three Bush terms (G.H.W. and G.W.) and two Clinton administrations, but I will let you decide who should get more acclaim for this.
• After the 2nd Gulf War began, you can see a prolonged decline in unemployment down to pre 9/11 rates. I am not promoting nor am I discounting the war, I am just saying that the statistics coincide and are probably correlated.
• It's interesting to see that the recent congress, the 110th Congress, had the Democrats as the majority party. It's since 100th's meeting in 2007 that there was a gradual rise in unemployment leading up to the current events. The majority lead has even increased in the succeeding congress, the 111th Congress.
  
• Just following a minimum wage increase, you can usually see an increase in unemployment, sometimes prolonged. Not being an economist, I can only speculate that if the two are correlated, then it is due to the sudden increase in operating costs that require spending cuts (in the form of decreased labor quantity).