Charts

The federal government’s social insurance programs have changed considerably over time. Accurate information about their coverage and performance is essential to having a productive discussion about the possibilities for reform. These figures show this trend.

Restricting focus to workers with a high school diploma or less, this chart shows that much of the uptick in hiring during the energy boom has come in the form of workers who were already employed, rather than those who were persistently nonemployed prior to hiring. This type of detail is useful for understanding the labor market impacts of technological shocks.

In recent years, this migration pattern has largely persisted, with rural populations continuing to decline in most of the country. The trend is particularly pronounced in the eastern half of the United States, as shown by calculations from the USDA’s Economic Research Service. This chart displays that trend.

The Current Popoulation Survey generates the labor force participation rate, an estimate of the fraction of the adult population that is either working or seeking work. This chart depicts labor force participation rate since the mid-twentieth century. 

Within a major field of study, graduates go on to pursue a range of occupations that vary widely in terms of annual earnings. For example, among 35- to 44-year-old college graduates who majored in finance, about 25 percent are employed in the top three occupations: accountants and auditors, financial managers, and other managers.This chart shows the earnings within these occupations by gender for individuals aged 35–44. 

After 10 years in the labor market, the typical four-year college graduate can expect to earn $27,000 more per year than the typical high school graduate. Given the high and increasing expense of a college education, this is no small part of the motivation for most students’ enrollment.

Private businesses make extensive use of the American Community Survey in determining when and where to open or expand stores, distribution centers, and warehouses. The ACS is useful for all these purposes because it provides detailed coverage of local areas. In this chart the capacity of the ACS to yield such information is demonstrated with a particular example: the share of the elderly in each local population. 

This chart shows that workers who are licensed are different from otherwise comparable certified workers—i.e., workers with a job credential that is not legally required to practice—in their propensity to move. Though licensed workers move within state at about the same rate as comparable certified workers, licensed workers are much less likely to move across states than are certified workers.

Drawing on data from the Current Population Survey, this chart shows that children whose mothers hold four-year degrees are nearly as likely to live with married parents today as they were in 1979. Strikingly, their counterparts with mothers who have only a high school diploma or some college have seen the share of children living with married parents decline sharply over the past 40 years.

One of the most important policy changes over the past quarter century was the shift to a work-based social safety net. The data for this chart, which shows the employment rates of women by marital status and number of children, come from the Current Population Survey, which helps answer a variety of important questions. Some of these questions are addressed in annual supplements, like the “Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement,” conducted every March. 

Over the past decade, domestic production of energy shot up as new technologies facilitated the extraction of previously unobtainable deposits. Estimates from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) provide crucial context for this development. This figure tracks these developments and projects future energy imports and exports. 

Because of its large size and distance from other developed economies, the United States is a relatively closed economy, with international trade amounting to a fairly small portion of its economic output. However, the role of trade has increased over recent decades, with imports persistently exceeding exports. This chart depicts these developments using data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Manufacturing tends to be a cyclical industry that prospers during strong economic times and languishes in bad, and the Great Recession that started in 2007 was especially destructive to the sector. This chart shows the percent change in manufacturing employment from 2007–2016.

Inflation calculations are important in part because payment increases under Social Security and other compensation programs are indexed to them. If inflation is over-stated, the total cost of the benefits will rise, causing a ripple effect through the budget. The Consumer Price Index is vital to understanding wage growth. 

This chart highlights the ability of the American Community Survey (ACS) to yield local estimates of specific types of workers—in this case, engineers—that a business may want to hire. 

This chart shows that agricultural exports ranging from grains to livestock have grown since 2000. This growth is fueled by steadily increasing demand in foreign economies as well as falling energy costs for agricultural producers in recent years.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a number of alternative measures that add information to provide a more comprehensive picture of the labor market. One of these measures, called U-6, includes discouraged workers and others who are outside the labor force but want work, as well as those who have part-time work but would prefer full-time work. As shown in this chart, this measure is substantially higher than the traditional unemployment rate.

The adverse consequences of a criminal record can be far-reaching. Access to the safety net is affected by criminal records, with 12 states placing strict restrictions on access to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for people with felony convictions.

This chart shows how in the state of Washington, mortality rates are much higher immediately after released prisoners leave prison than before or afterward. 

The negative association of incarceration with earnings increases throughout adulthood. This chart shows that  individuals who were incarcerated at least once during the period 1979–2012 earn substantially less than those who were never incarcerated.

This chart shows that possession of a criminal record is found to decrease the probability of being called back for an interview for both white and black applicants

Criminal records constitute an important barrier to employment. This chart shows that criminal records are distributed unevenly across the population, with lower levels of education correlating with higher levels of incarceration. 

In the most recent study of recidivism, 77 percent of state prisoners who were released in 2005 had been arrested again by 2010. Recidivism is highest immediately after release: 43 percent of released prisoners are rearrested during the first year. By contrast, those who are not quickly rearrested are less likely to recidivate.

The disparate criminal justice experience of black Americans has played an important role in reform discussions. Differences in incarceration rates are stark.

This chart shows the types of crimes committed by prisoners in federal and state prison, and those who have reentered society and are now on parole. 

Our criminal justice system is predominantly state based, with states’ policy decisions affecting far more people than federal policy decisions. This complicates the analysis of the U.S. criminal justice system, given that states differ in terms of policy and experience of crime.

In 2012 the United States spent more than $265 billion ($845 per person) on criminal justice, including corrections, policing, and judicial expenses. States and local governments shoulder the largest share, totaling $213 billion.

Prison populations can increase when more people enter prison or when convicted prisoners receive longer sentences. These charts show how longer sentences have impacted state prison populations over time, as well as the how the type of crime committed impacts sentence length.

Over the past 30 years incarceration in the United States has increased to unprecedented levels, with about 2.25 million Americans held in local jails or in state and federal prisons in 2014.

While the private sector has added jobs to the economy in every month since March 2010, a total increase of approximately 6.8 million jobs through April 2013, the public sector has contracted. This figure shows the ratio of government employment to the civilian non-institutional population going back to 1980. For the twenty years prior to the Great Recession, this ratio stayed relatively constant, but since then it has dropped precipitously (except for the temporary uptick in 2010 when government employment rose to accommodate demand for U.S. Census workers). 

The Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) legislated $500 billion of cuts to the national defense budget over the next ten years—an abrupt change that could weaken the Department of Defense (DoD) if the cuts are not distributed efficiently. However, as this graph demonstrates, sudden and significant changes to defense spending are not new challenges. 

Over the next ten years, approximately $4 trillion of deficit reduction are set to take place through the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 (ATRA) and the sequestration, which went into effect on March 1, 2013. This graph, from the introduction of The Hamilton Project’s 15 Ways to Rethink the Federal Budget shows how these policies are projected to affect the debt-to-GDP ratio over the next decade.