You love ’em. We love ’em. Steve Rattner returned this morning with some of his famous charts. One of those charts may have had to do with Congress AND Paris Hilton.
You can watch the video below for further analysis, but we’ve picked out some of the highlights for you.
CHART 1–2011 Popularity Poll
Rattner got some inspiration from Sen. Michael Bennet on this chart.
“If you take take a look at Congress’ popularity…you see Congress is sitting down here at 9 percent….Paris Hilton has a 15 percent approval rating, so she has a higher approval rating than Congress. The IRS has a 40 percent approval rating…When I was in the government in 2009, Congress was in the low 20s, and they’ve now sunk down to 9 in two years.”
CHART 2–What Will Drive Our Debt
“When you talk about what to do about the budget and the budget deficit, it really comes down to one thing, which is health care. Everything else is going to be held flat as a percentage of GDP. Even Social Security remains constant as a percent of GDP as [do] other programs and so-called discretionary spending, which includes a lot of good things like education and so forth. What’s really driving our budget problem is health-care spending.”
CHART 3–The Path Back to Employment
“You see the decline from the peak in 2008, and then you see some scenarios going back out again. If you take the best year in the 2000s for job creation, 2005, it would take us until 2024 to get back to where we were in 2008.”
Drew Katchen