Gummint size has *shrunk* under Obama. Wait! What?

-
Yeah, its true.
The number of gummint employees has actually gone down under Obama.  The chart above, based on the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, shows the number of (federal) public sector employees added since Obama's inauguration.
Helpfully, it also shows the same under Bush (hat-tip Krugman).

The Bottom line is that we currently have almost 700K less Gummint employees than when Obama started!!!

And the spike?
That big honking spike that proves that Obama is an evil baddie dude?
Those are the census workers - the temporary (!!!) census workers - that are (Temporarily!!!) hired once every 10 years.  So no, can't use that against him.
So, seriously, based on the chart above,  
  1. Which of these is the "Big Gummint" President?  
  2. Which of these is the "Shrinks Gummint" President?
Mind you, this is no real surprise - after all, data is data...
As I've said earlier
So yeah, the bottom line (to the bottom line) is that if you care about reducing the size of government spending (Yes! You! I'm talking to you, who is so clearly frothing at the mouth about this, even though Austerity Now! Austerity Forever! is destroying economies all around), you want to vote for a Democrat as President.  Because they clearly do better, and the Republicans, even more clearly do worse.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cannonball Tree!

-
Image
Spotted this one just outside the Ravindra Kalakshetra in Bangalore .  Its called the Cannonball Tree , but is - technically (i.e., in Latin, if thats your metier) - Couroupita Guianensis , or ನಾಗಲಿಂಗ ಪುಷ್ಪಾ  in Kannada. The fruits look like Cannonballs (well, d-uh), and the flowers are really quite amazing, and pretty ludicrously distinctive...
Read more

Erlang, Binaries, and Garbage Collection (Sigh)

-
Image
The nice thing about garbage-collection is that it is makes memory management absolutely transparent to you Of course, the above is true right up to the point when it stops being transparent, at which point it does a phase change from nice to clusterf**k of biblical proportions .  There are entire posts, books, and suicide notes that have been written about this, and I have no great desire to add to them, save with the minor comment that paranoia about garbage-collection is still justified , albeit only in the edge-cases for most people. That said, I'll give you that Erlang GC is in many ways much, much better positioned in this regard than, oh, Java, but it still rears up and bites you in the butt when you least expect it. ( More information about Erlang's GC vis-a-vis Java here , and Jesper's truly excellent description of Erlang's GC here ).  A story from the past should serve to illustrate this. Once upon a time, in a magical land far far away - well, Her
Read more

Visualizing Prime Numbers

-
Image
From Jason Davies , we have El Patron de Los Primos , probably one of the coolest prime number visualizer that I've seen.  For every Natural number, he draws a periodic curve that intersects at that number and each of its multiples.  Needless to say, prime numbers are touched by only two curves (itself and 1 ). You can scroll to the right, and move up the prime food change. (The image above is a screen grab.  Go here to see the actual thing)
Read more