Fun With Charts

The President recently asked people to start using a new Twitter icon to publicize the progress made by the stimulus bill. The icon is a bar graph that shows the number of jobs lost by month for the last year of the Bush Administration and the first year of the Obama administration.

While most of us look at it and see a typical V-shaped recession curve, President Obama color codes the bars with the downward trend in red (blamed on Bush) and the upward trend in blue (credited to Obama).

I decided to create another icon using the same metric going back to 2004. The first three years of quarterly data are in red (credited to the GOP Congress) and the last three years in blue (blamed on the Democrat Congress).

My point is only this: charts can be used to say just about anything. Feel free to use this one to mock those using Obama's.