PrintAugust 29, 2010
Graph of the Day for August 29, 2010
"I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing." Barack Obama, 2008.
Data source: St. Louis Fed/FRED, GDPC96 series, with values normalized to "peaks" by author. (The 2008 "peak" used here was the 2nd quarter of 2008. That had been the peak value of real GDP prior to the Dept. of Commerce's revisions July 30, 2010. After the revision, the 2Q08 value is 0.03% below the 4Q07 value.)
Hoven's Index for August 29, 2010
Percent of 16-24 year-olds working or looking for work, July 2010: 60.5%
Percent employed: 48.9%
(Both values are the lowest on record, which began in 1948.)
Percent of African-American 16-24 year-olds employed, July 2010: 34.4%
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, August 27, 2010.
Graph of the Day Archive.
