Not News: Fewer Than 0.5% of Americans Live in Fully Recovered Counties
In his State of the Union address — perhaps, based on the recommendations for government involvement and control he made therein, better described as his Statist of the Union address — President Obama referenced the “growing” U.S. economy at least three times, but “recovery” only once. Specifically, he claimed that “thanks to a growing economy, the recovery is touching more and more lives.”
The recovery, which Obama acknowledged is still in progress over 5-1/2 years after the recession officially ended, has a great deal more “touching” to do. On January 12, the National Association of Counties released a detailed study which most of the press ignored, but which would have been front-page and broadcast-leading news in a Republican or conservative presidential administration. The NACo report showed that only 65 of the nation’s 3,069 counties have fully recovered from the recession. That’s bad enough, but even with that ugly statistic, the results involved are worse than they appear.
Eric Morath’s coverage of the report at the Wall Street Journal’s Real Time Economics blog missed a key point, namely how sparsely populated the 65 fully recovered counties are:
Of More Than 3,000 U.S. Counties, Just 65 Have Recovered From Recession, NACo Says
… The 2014 County Economic Tracker shows that 65 of the nation’s 3,069 counties have met or surpassed prerecession levels in four measured categories: jobs, unemployment rate, economic output and home prices.
… The recovered counties are largely located in energy-rich areas and have small populations. Of the 65 recovered counties, 24 are in Texas and 16 are in North Dakota. The others are generally in the middle of the country, including nine in Minnesota and eight in Kansas.
None of the recovered counties has more than 500,000 residents.
Actually, only 15 of the counties are in North Dakota. Far more important, a detailed look at 2013 Census data using the bureau’s interactive tool indicates that none of the recovered counties has more than 200,000 residents:
Also, as seen above, 34 of the counties, or over half, have populations of under 10,000.
The 65 fully-recovered counties represent just over 2 percent of all U.S. counties, but their total population of under 1.4 million is less than one-half of one percent of the nation’s total. This means that 99.56 percent of Americans live in counties which have not fully come back to where they were in 2007.
But the Obama administration and its press acolytes continue to crow about the economy. Unreal.
A crowning irony is that if the Obama administration’s environmental zealots had their way and had stopped hydraulic fracturing, the number of fully recovered counties today would be likely have been cut by more than half from the already absolutely abysmal total.
Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.
In the counties that were not in the oil patch per se, did any of these recovering counties perhaps have a steel mill making pipe or some other major presence of oil & gas related supply manufacture?
Comment by dscott — January 23, 2015 @ 11:39 am
Even Political Calculations fell for the fallacy of the zero sum game in the fall of oil prices. They failed to account for the balance of payment flows of money out of the domestic economy. The domestic energy industry represents a stimulus to the economy by virtue of the fact that every dollar not sent overseas to buy foreign oil means wealth that was created domestically is NOT sent (bled) out of the economy which then gets recycled here creating more jobs and wealth.
BTW-consumption or wealth destruction is not equal among all purchases of consumable items like gasoline/oil. Buying foreign oil means little if any recycling of leftovers from consumption, i.e. outsourcing of wages, investments, processing and manufacturing.
Comment by dscott — January 23, 2015 @ 11:46 am
I want to circle back to the comment I made on the Fed on the other thread because I believe it is relevant here. It seems to me or maybe I missed it, that Obama and his fellow liberals don’t have any urgency of real employment and simply use the useless unemployment stats that exclude millions of people who dropped off the unemployment rolls due to being over one year unemployed to mollify the public. I believe the point here is that everyone who needs something to eat has what they barely need (Body Mass Index not withstanding).
It occurs to me that Obama (and liberals) is playing a slick con game to keep those of us who are productive working and not going Galt. Given the unlimited ability for the Fed to wire ones and zeros to the Treasury to make up for any deficit in tax revenue, why bother collecting taxes at all? When we get down to it, isn’t the Fed actions getting people, i.e. government employees to work for free since the value represented in the dollar is totally imaginary? There are literally millions of Federal workers and contractors/vendors working essentially for free. All the welfare recipients are living for free using imaginary money, i.e. the Feds electronic ones and zeros. All of these people, the Federal employees, the contractors, the vendors, the welfare recipients, grant recipients are all living off the labors of the productive… When one group of people gets another group of people to work for free, that is called slavery.
Taxes are merely the clever manipulation of the working public view that they actually have income that is real. If you tax something, therefore you must have something to take. When Obama harps about income inequality, what he really is saying is all human efforts are equal and therefore should be equally compensated. Therefore a janitor’s work is equal to a doctor’s work. Therefore both should receive the same compensation. Hence, Obama makes offers of free Community College or forgiveness of student loans if they do government service for a certain period of years. What did Karl Marx say? “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” We saw how the Soviet Union turned out, it never ends up like they plan.
Comment by dscott — January 23, 2015 @ 12:15 pm
Nice graphic:
The. Worst. Recession. Jobs. Recovery. Ever.
http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-worst-recession-jobs-recovery-ever.html#.VMKEKq5jAgw
Comment by dscott — January 23, 2015 @ 12:28 pm
The steel mill or pipe idea is a real possibility, but I suspect most of those plants are in areas which have otherwise not recovered well. Greater Cincy has a couple of such plants, and we certainly haven’t fully recovered.
Comment by Tom — January 23, 2015 @ 1:26 pm
[...] post follows up on Friday morning’s entry (at BizzyBlog; at NewsBusters) showing that “Fewer Than 0.5% of Americans Live in Fully Recovered [...]
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