Obama’s monthly jobs record is WAY better than what it was in the months before he took office. In every commercial, he can just contrast his tenure with the period before it, and remind people how much better things are now. Also worth noting that the 8.3% unemployment rate is the lowest is since Obama’s first month in office.

The first problem with this chart is that it starts in December 2007, so all we see is a bunch of jobs being lost at the end of the Bush administration and a bunch of jobs being created during the Obama administration. Here is the chart you would have shown if you wanted to highlight Bush.

Hey, look, we had robust job growth for like 6 straight years. Awesome! Oops, there’s that little plunge at the end there…but it’s alright, Obama knows how to insert that stimulating magic!

And here’s what an honest person would have looked at.

That’s a whole lot less impressive isn’t it? For a look at how this recovery stacks up against the one after the recession of 1981 let’s look at a different chart.

(Data)

When you look at employment over an even longer scale you realize that there’s nothing particularly impressive about this recovery. It looks pretty meh to me.

Based on the history of postwar recessions a rebound in employment was inevitable. The fact that this rebound is so slow definitely doesn’t make Obama look good. Maybe Joe wasn’t saying his chart was accurate, maybe he was just suggesting that it paints a pretty picture for Obama. Either way, every post from Joe at BI is riddled with cherry picked data. Read him with many grains of salt.

That premise is that Obama has been a wild spender, and that now there’s an urgent need to make cuts. As we highlighted yesterday, there’s simply nothing special about the growth of government spending under Obama. Here’s a look at annual real growth in government spending going back to 1947.

He then presents this chart.

His numbers seemed a little bizarre so I found the data and charted it myself. It turns out his chart wasn’t looking at year over year Federal outlays at all. This is what year over year federal spending look like compared to overall growth in spending compared to various administrations.

A commenter suggested that perhaps his chart included state and local data? Whatever the case, he was blatantly dishonest about spending growth under the Obama administration.

If this chart proves anything it is that neither party is actually committed to shrinking the government in practice, even if they claim to be in theory.

Open up Photoshop and create your design. For this example, here is mine:

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Now, you want to go through and simplify your folder structure and name everything concisely. Finally, take everything that is visible, including the background, and group it into one folder like so:

Now, let’s say we want to riff on this design and do another iteration with a different color. Rather than opening a new document or duplicating only the layers we want to change and trying to remember which layers should be visible for which comp, let’s keep it simple. Duplicate the whole group.

You can then make your changes in the new duplicated folder. And, if you want to compare one state to another, it’s as simple as clicking the visibility icon one time. This makes comparing versions of a design much, much easier.

The best way to generate comps is to use the “Layer Comps” panel. Make sure you have the version you want to be the first jpeg visible in the layers panels and click “Create new layer comp.” Name it whatever your group folder is named and repeat the process.

Now that you have layer comps for each state  you can click through them by clicking the icon to the left of the layer comp you want to preview.

Now, the genius part that they don’t teach you in design school. We’re going to use a script to output all of our layer comps as separate jpeg files without having to do one at a time.

When you’re done you should have an organized folder with neat file names that are all ready for clients, art directors or your portfolio.

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Say you’ve got an image that’s faded or has very low contrast and you want to fix that. The typical way of doing that would be to use image>adjustments>Brightness/Contrast. Or to open Levels and “pinch” the dark and light sliders in to the histogram. These ways work but tend to manipulate your colors in undesirable ways and render your image un-editable afterward.

If you want to add contrast like a pro do this: create an adjustments layer on top of your image and pinch the dark sliders for dark and light pixels in the histogram to the center until they’re aligned to the dark and light pixels that actually exist in the image. this will allow you to make as many changes as you want later and preview them in real time.

Now, the most important part: set that layer’s blending mode to “Overlay.”

Using the “overlay” blending mode is very important as it takes the adjustments you’ve created and applies them to specific areas of the histogram. The adjustments to the darks are now being applied to the darks and so on. And here is our result:

And a comparison:

In order to put things in perspective and hopefully shame the people who make these silly arguments I put together a simple infographic.

Of course, police, fire fighters, roads and schools are all part of state and local budgets and have nothing to do with a debate on federal spending. Shame on you if use this as a rhetorical device as it is inaccurate, cheap and misleading. I couldn’t find reliable information on just how much it costs to build and maintain roads in America. That information is fairly dispersed but if you know a good source for that info please let me know. I used the FAA as an example of a “basic” service.

Having created and run a corporation I know firsthand what it is I was creating and exactly what I was entering into. What is important to distinguish however was that in no part of the process was “the state” creating something new. The corporation has a name and an EIN (employer identification number) but that is merely a documentation referring to the agreement entered into by the founders of the corporation. The state was merely making a public record of such an agreement and keeping said record stored and available as evidence that our arrangement was entered into. It also treats this arrangement within a specific legal system, one with different rules and practices from the general law governing the person on the street who, by themselves is not entered into a legal agreement with anybody else.

Entering into contractual obligations with others is useless if there is no record of such agreements. So it would seem that the need for separate legal entities as well as public documentation of agreements and incorporation being entered into arises from the need for a clear, documented and voluntary dispute resolution system. Nowhere yet in this outline of corporate legal theory has the question of what the corporation does or who it exists to benefit arisen. Nor should it have. And whether this legal system is established by a legislative act, codification of common law, judicial precedent or anarcho-spontaneity is meaningless with regards to the question of what the corporation will do or make and for whom. The law exists to set boundaries between entities, not coerce entities to pursue specific ends. In other words, the law deals with means, not ends.

Fair enough you say, but what if the law did force legal entities to pursue certain ends out of a sense of moral superiority? That has now become a completely separate issue and question to be answered in separate realms. The moment you pervert the law to achieve personal ends you have changed the meaning of the law. The law would then cease to be a transparent, predictable framework in which people voluntarily interact with one another. It would become a mere political instrument, the ethical equivalent of holding a person’s livelihood hostage in exchange for compliance.

Because corporations pay a fee to incorporate and they take on their own private debts, the tax payer does not have any relevant ethical claim to be able to determine how the corporation runs its business. Yes, but the corporation may possibly use the publicly provided court system to resolve private legal conflicts! Then tax all corporations enough to cover possible expenses incurred by the tax payer. That still would not give other people the right to determine what the corporation made or did. In fact, at this point in the argument the matter of what the corporation makes or does has still not come up, because from a legal standpoint it doesn’t matter. It does not matter to the law whether a corporation makes widget A or widget B, whether it hired worker A or worker B. As long as the corporation is within the same transparent, predictable and unbiased legal framework as every other economic actor it makes no difference what they make or how. If a corporation wanted to pay people to smash rocks all day it could, and they would be well within their rights to do so.

At no point does the corporation exist to serve the needs of the state, or taxpayers, it is just another entity (like the state and taxpayers) that exists within a legal framework. Unless a person legally comes into ownership of a corporation they cannot make any decision for that corporation regarding what that corporation makes and for whom. For the same reason that a corporation cannot determine which corporations consumers buy products from. The legal principle that prevents you from controlling a corporation you do not own is the same one that prevents a corporation from forcing you to buy their products or pay for their services; private property.

The principle of private property rights states that as long as you acquired the property ethically, without stealing it, then you are free to do whatever you want with it. This is the only ethical principle that matters and it precedes every other type of “right” you can imagine. Upending the principle of private property rights to achieve your personal political ends is a foolish endeavor and one that threatens to upend the property rights of everyone. Local churches, homeless shelters, union workers, teachers; everyone relies on private property to protect themselves from the advances of the selfish.