This Lousy Economy, in Three Simple Charts

The May jobs report came out today and showed an economy barely adding any jobs: Just 69,000 were added last month, and the unemployment rate increased. This follows news yesterday that GDP was revised downward for the first quarter, and a report today that real incomes remain essentially unchanged.

This really is not news. In fact, it is a pretty old story. The media likes to follow the short-term fluctuations in the economy to write stories about it gaining or losing momentum, but when you pull back from the news cycle you can see that things have been flat like this for well over a year.