Click to enlarge.
An optimist would exclaim, "Yay! The government's going to lower taxes and the number of civilian employed will increase dramatically! That's clearly how we'll make it back to the median trend line in red. No worries!"
Unfortunately, I'm not an optimist.
1. The largest peak was in the early 2000s. We returned to the median. It was painful.
2. The second largest peak was in the late 2007 to early 2008 period. We returned to the median. It was painful.
3. We seem to be peaking again.
4. What's up with that blue trend line?
5. Who's up for a game of fiscal cliff diving?
Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart
Instead of per civilian how about per civilian dollar earned?
ReplyDeleteThat one might be a bit tricky to nail down. Wages?
ReplyDeleteWhat would you define earned to be? I can find wages and salaries for those on payrolls. What do I do with self-employed stock market daytraders? I'm not sure if I could find that data.
Personal current taxes / Compensation of Employees, Received: Wage and Salary Disbursements
Close enough?
This post's chart shows yet another plateau beginning near the peak of domestic oil production.
ReplyDeleteCraig M. Brandenburg,
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting observation. I was apparently too caught up on the right side of the chart to give it much thought.
Would there be anything left if we excluded FIRE & MIC?
ReplyDeleteTJamdTheBear,
ReplyDeleteWe should probably exclude the taxes on manufacturing pay too just to be safe.
Gallows sarcasm. Sigh.
Nah, the U.S. is still a total export powerhouse... but that sector just doesn't employ anyone anymore!
ReplyDeleteFIRE owes it's very existence these days to the Fed; the MIC is nearly all DoD, of course.
TJandTheBear,
ReplyDeleteI say we just double the payroll taxes on every factory floor worker in every fully automated factory. What? There aren't any workers to tax?
More gallows sarcasm. Sigh.