If it's the first Friday of the month, it must be Employment Day!

Here's the latest graph of employment. This is the Bush admin's final chart. And, I must say, it is seriously pathetic. With the initial hit from the collapse of the Dot-Com Bubble, it wasn't until October of 2004 that employment was back to when Bush took office. Then we had three years of rapid employment growth, beginning in January of '03 and ending in December of '06. This should now be tagged the Housing Bubble. In December of 2006 the bubble stopped growing, and starting in April of 2008 popped dramatically.

Click for a large version of image:



Some notes on the chart. In January of 2003, the Bureau of Labor Statistics changed the way it harvested the household survey data. This change caused a jump of 3.58 million jobs. I have plotted three horizontal lines. The small red one represents the Employment Survey's January, 2001 position.

For the Household Survey, because of this change, I plotted two small purple lines. The lower one is the reported January, 2001 starting point, the second is 3.58 million jobs higher, an estimate of the employment levels if the later system had been in place.

Bottom line: If you take the Household jump back off, in 8 years, the economy only added 2.5 million new jobs.