Quote:
Originally posted by Scipio
Gotta love how a chart says one thing and people just assume it says something else, when it actually doesn't.
The claim: The Bush administration has, over the last 3 years, made claims about future job growth that have been both extremely optimistic and extremely wrong.
Extrapolating the graph back 5 years adds nothing. Unless you want to argue that the Bush administration has been expecting rates of job growth that surpass the unprecedented job growth of the Clinton years.
My graph looked back 5 years. You called that a "snapshot." Am I missing something here? If you go back to 1994 instead of 1999 (which you wouldn't do since you're only looking at Bush), isn't that just 2 snapshots? Doesn't your own graph fall prey to your own dishonest arguments?
In short, my graph makes claims that are limited, and not "sweeping." It covers 5 years, and is not "a snapshot."
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Adding 5 years says nothing? It's obvious that it gives a completely different picture than the one you point to. The overall trend in non farm job growth is
far steeper than the snapshot you point to.
The trend in the job market is not limited by who the President is. Of course, when you only want to prove that the President is failing rather than understand the real data, I can see why you would limit it.
Ten years offers a far better picture than the 5 years you point to. Of course, I could have added data back beyond 1994 but the overall trend is the same. Rather than cutting the data points off to prove inaccurate analyses, I did it for the sake of convenience. Using a monthly data set for much more than the ten years I showed hits the limits of Excel's number of columns. (I could have fit maybe 20 years of data before reaching the limits)
Here is what the trend looks like from 1970 through 2004...
