Monday, April 11, 2011

Two Charts

We've reached the limits of what government spending can do for us. Right now, we're simply printing money and handing it out and there's no appreciable effect.

Printing Money:



Unemployment:


4 comments:

tim eisele said...

There is another interesting graph at this site: the Industrial Production Index.

If you give it the same time interval (March 2009 to now), you'll see the IPI steadily increasing from 84 to 93. This increasing industrial production is not reflected in decreased unemployment.

I suspect that this is because robots don't get included in employment statistics.

Which is related to another point: robots don't pay social security or contribute to medicaid, either.

tim eisele said...

You can generate a third rather interesting graph by going to

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?id=INDPRO

which plots the Industrial Production Index. It is interesting that, over the time interval from about May 2009 to now, the IPI has gone up steadily from 84 to 93. This increase in industrial production is not reflected in the unemployment numbers.

I suspect that this is mainly because robots don't figure into the employment statistics.

Related to this, robots don't pay Social Security or Medicare, either.

tim eisele said...

(And, a note about the comment system: lately, if I try to embed a link into a comment, the comment seems to vanish without a trace. But, if I just put in the link as text, the comment gets accepted. Spam filter issues, maybe?)

K T Cat said...

Tim, I'm sorry to hear about your other comments. I just checked my settings and I didn't see anything that would cause that to happen.