Yahoo News has a
graph, courtesy the Department of Labor, that show jobless claims back to December 11th. The problem with the graph is that the baseline for jobless claims (the vertical axis) is 300(x1000) instead of zero. So the number of jobless claims for the most recent week (302,000) appears to be about 1/20th the number for the highest week (367,000 for the week of January 8th).
The graph appears below.
Visually, it looks like the jobless claims have fallen by about 90% in 6 weeks, which I'm sure the administration would like us to believe (the actual decline was about 18%).
Surely the folks at Yahoo News know that if the baseline isn't zero the graph is not going to be proportional? Don't they?