The secret is where you drop your endpoints. As just one example, the first chart clips off a stretch of 47 months of positive private job growth between the summer of 2003 and the summer of 2007. Except for the two-month negative blip in the summer of 2007, it would have been 54 months, taking it to the beginning of Geithner's chart.

In the second chart, GDP growth, the left end clips off a record of constant positive GDP growth between the fourth quarter of 2001 and the fourth quarter of 2007. Six years without a negative number, with an average across that time of about 3 percent.

The third graph, showing how flat government employment is, is a bit more tricky. "Government employment" includes state and local governments, paid for mostly by state and local taxes. If you crack Federal employment loose from that figure, it looks a bit different.

Not for nothing do ten of the fifteen richest counties in the United States adjoin Washington DC.

It would take me a long time to plow through this whole thing, but I don't think this is going to work.

Unemployment is still over 8 percent (and expected to stay over that number for the next two years at least), gasoline is at $4.00 a gallon and climbing, deficits are still running over a trillion dollars every year, and Obama's own budget shows deficits in the $700 billion range for the next ten years, floating back up to the trillion mark at the end of that period. Remember all the noises made here about Bush's record $450 billion deficit year? And that's making several assumptions, including killing the Bush tax cuts (still in effect, by the way), slashing Medicare doctor payments, multiple new new taxes, and a unrealistically robust growth rate. Federal spending is planned to stay at 22 percent of GDP or higher. Forever.

The gross Federal debt now is about $15.5 trillion (as of March 1), comfortably over the 100-percent-of-GDP mark. Obama, in one term, has already added as much to the debt as Bush did in two terms (and that was no small change), and he's got many months to go.

P.S. refreshing to see some hard data here, even if some of it is "cooked" a bit for the presentation. You are correct that the sources are good ones. Thanks!