Employment

Here's the current graph of employment:


To explain my color scheme:

• The shaded areas represent election day to election day, with Bush II in pink and Obama in blue.
  
• The vertical line represent the official start of each president's term.
  
• The blue line on the graph represents the household survey of employment
  
• The red line is the employers' survey of employment.

Amazingly, the Household Survey for May showed a decline of 35,000 jobs. And this after I woke up to NPR crowing that this was going to be a fantastic jobs report. It looks to me like we're still bleeding.

The Employers Survey is more rosy, with a respectable increase of 431,000 jobs, YAY!!!...but there is a really big caveat: it includes government jobs. The increase in non-government jobs in May was: 41,000, very anemic.

Since the start of the year, and according to the Establishment Survey, employment has increased by 1,008,000 total jobs, with 480,000 of them government jobs and 528,000 private sector, or what we call "productive" jobs.

I've always put more trust in the Household Survey, because the Employers Survey just looks at big employers and doesn't capture small business at all. It shows and increase of 1,087,000 since the start of the year.

Another way to look at this, is that the HS shows that there have been no net jobs gained since July, 2004.