Comments on: What is the Sound of Washington State’s Economy Treading Water?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 20:07:00 +0000

Good Lord, someone save us! (Batman, Spiderman, Bueller??)

I had a colleague a while back (very conservative) who insisted that the best way to manage gov’t operations was to keep pushing them down the stack, from federal, to state, to city…. I could only imagine that he’d never seen the details of State vs federal employees’ output. Yeah, the feds have their issues, but nothing like these mooks.

By: Michael van Baker

Michael van Baker — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 20:01:00 +0000

Ha! Then I have a funny story for you!

http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitics/2011/06/16/and-the-number-is-whatever-you-say-it-is/

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 19:50:00 +0000

I hear you, MvB! Excel has turned into a complete piece of crap as far as making graphs goes. I actually thought this had come from the State, which would be more inexcusable. (hell, they have unlimited resources, right?)

I’m no expert on this economic stuff – apparently nobody is, as far as I can tell. But I do now data and data presentation. Having a $183 million shortfall sounds really, really bad. But if the expected revenue was $500 million would be a far different story than if it were 2 billion. Or 20 billion. I’m just asking for context and data.

By: Michael van Baker

Michael van Baker — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 18:14:00 +0000

Hey, *you* try making a graph in Excel these days. I remember when you could just make a graph with a single line. I have no idea why it placed the data points in the middle, when they belong at the top. Anyway, unemployment is more than important–I’m arguing it’s the crux of the state’s economic failure. Right *there* is the missing demand, the missing tax revenue, etc., and it’s chronic. It would be an almost perfectly flat line for the past two years, except for the recent revision of the unemployment numbers upward in early ’10.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 03:04:00 +0000

What the hell is the first graph? No labels on the axes, but a helpful blue square (against an identical blue background) that says ‘unemployment rate’. Sadly, those numbers seem to have nothing to do with the y-axis.

And, given that the article seems to focus on Raha’s numbers, wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to show how his numbers have changed over time (given that you talk about it changing $183 million – from what??) We’ve got 2 unemployment graphs combined with a discussion of state revenue.

Clearly unemployment is important (and depressing), but these graphs are just ‘look nice’ things.