Charting Today's Course

From Econbrowser, your chart for the day.




Given that your income in 2008 was in one of these categories, here's the odds of you being unemployed, underemployed, or discouraged from looking for a job in 2010.

In other words, if you made around minimum wage, or under 20k a year in 2008, the odds of you still having your job are very, very low. 23% chance of being unemployed, 14% of working less than 40 hours a week, and an 8% chance of just having given up totally, or about a 45% chance of being without a full time job.

Meanwhile, if you were making 150k or more in 2008, those total odds of being without a full-time job now are about 7%.

For the vast majority of working-class Americans and especially the working poor, this is a full-blown depression.

Any wonder then that working-class whites are flocking to the Republicans?

An Associated Press-GfK poll shows whites without four-year college degrees preferring GOP candidates by twice the margin of the last two elections, when Democrats made significant gains in the House and Senate. The poll, conducted last month, found this group favoring GOP hopefuls 58% to 36% — a whopping 22 percentage-point gap.

Obama knows it will take a long time to fix our problems, and there are problems that we have that may not be solved anytime soon.  But the unemployment issue means that millions of Americans don't have the time to wait for Obama and the Democrats to fix things, and they are buying the snake oil that the GOP is selling, convinced that it's everyone else getting the help and not themselves.  This chart of course means nothing could be further from the truth, the poorest among us are the ones suffering the most in the job market.

But if you voted for Obama in 2008 and then have been out of work since 2009, you're not going to give much of a damn about turning out again for the Dems in 2010.  I can understand that.  The talk radio types have convinced a lot of people that Obama is giving away the store to African-Americans and Latinos, when unemployment among those groups is actually significantly higher.  The help must be going there, because it's not going to the working-class whites.

The reality is however that the Republicans will only make things worse.  They'll give the money to the wealthiest and aren't ashamed to admit it.  As a friend of mine reminds me, at least the Democrats are honest about spending taxpayer money on social programs.