Goods Producers and Their Disproportionate Value

My materials analysis laboratory, Anderson Materials Evaluation, Inc., exists to support the producers of goods in the USA.  I consider this mission to be a noble one.  To be sure, we provide research and development services to institutions other than manufacturers, provide quality control verifications of their supplies for service providers, and we provide some environmental safety evaluations as well.  However, the core of our business is assisting manufacturers with their materials problems and processing concerns and their product development.

Compared to the employment of private sector service providers and even of government employees, the number of goods producers are a beset minority.  The Federal Reserve of St. Louis provides the data:

As of December 2025, there were 21,477,000 goods-producing workers and 113,613,000 service workers in the private sector.  The total number of government "workers" was 23,359,000.  The goods-producers were outnumbered by these government employees by almost 1.9 million.  The ratio of private sector service providers to private sector goods-producers was 5.29.

Let us examine how households actually spend their money.  We will again turn to the data of the Federal Reserve of St. Louis:

The ratio of money spent on services to that spent on goods is only 2.24 as of December 2025.  This is much smaller than the ratio of service providers to goods producers of 5.29.

One cannot say that an American goods-producer is thereby 5.29/2.24 = 2.36 times more valuable than an American service provider in the economy.  Many of the goods consumed by U.S. households are produced in countries using slave labor or very low cost labor, or by heavily subsidized and little-regulated industries.  Those are advantages that my laboratory tries to help American manufacturers overcome by helping them produce superior goods at lower production costs so they can tap into this value of goods to households that is revealed by their spending choices. 

Since 2005, the number of goods-producing Americans has been relatively constant, aside from dips in and shortly after recessions.  Despite that, the value of American goods has increased.  With good energy policies that take advantage of our tremendous carbon-based fuel resources to provide low cost and highly reliable energy, with reductions in the cost (burden) of government which in 2025 was 37.7% of GDP, and with further reductions in the number of irrational government regulations, American goods-producers could grow in number and the value of American manufacturing could grow faster than it has.  The potential is there.

Let me offer you this nugget to justify my statement that there is plenty of reason to believe that reliable energy and good government policy has the power to increase the number of manufacturing employees.  Note the fact that from 2014 to 2024, the states of Florida, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Arizona, South Carolina, Utah, Alabama, and Missouri were able to increase the percentage of manufacturing employees by substantial percentages.  If state government policies have so much effect, then federal government policies and the improvement of other state government and local government policies must have a large effect on manufacturing employment also.  The potential is there.

The Goods-Producing Jobs Picture -- Trump Period Compared to Obama Period

In the last 21 months, namely for all of 2017 and 2018 to date, there has been a sky-rocketing increase in goods-producing jobs compared to the prior 21 months.  These goods-producing jobs are jobs in mining, construction, and manufacturing.  Charles Payne pointed this out in Strongest Economy Ever?

Trump last 21 months:  825,000 new goods-producing jobs

Obama prior 21 months:  275,000 new goods-producing jobs

Remember that the "New Normal" economy under Obama was said to have no place for less-educated Americans except in the low-paying portion of the service economy.  Their unemployment rate was expected to remain high forever.  They were doomed to be replaced by robots to the extent that goods-producing jobs were even going to be part of our American economy.  Goods-producing jobs were said to be planet-destructive and therefore we should be happy to see them become extinct.  The Obama regulatory agencies were tasked with seeing that large segments of the goods-producing industries were driven into bankruptcy.  Besides, American goods-producing industries simply could not compete with the low-cost labor overseas it was said, so they were doomed anyway.

The reality is that goods-producing industries were doomed to extinction under Obama, but not under Trump.  It takes a murderous hand to kill off the economic vigor of Capitalism and Obama with his determination to transform America had just such a murderous hand on the neck of goods-producing American capitalists.  Trump simply stopped trying to strangle goods-producing American capitalists and they responded by increasing the rate of new goods-producing jobs by a factor of 3.

Now tell me that that difference is not critically important to a great many American workers and their families.  Tell me that healthy American goods-producing industries are not important to our national security.  I will have a hard time suppressing my laughter at such foolish notions.

Labor Union Membership, Right to Work, and Education

Labor unions have been having a tough time competing in the private sector for a long time and now are even shrinking as a percentage of government workers.  In 2015, union workers were 11.1% of the work force.  This fell to 10.7% in 2016 with a loss of 240,000 union members.  Only 6.4% of private sector workers are now union members.  The mainstay of the unions is in the government sector with 29.6% of state government employees being union members and 40.3% of local government employees being members.  The local government union membership is much inflated by the many teachers who pretend to manage 25 or 30 people in the classroom, but are really blue-collar workers unable to negotiate their own work compensation as individuals.  The high percentage of government workers in unions has more recently been falling so that the percentages above are 15-year lows.

Within the last year, West Virginia and Kentucky have become Right to Work states, increasing the number of Right to Work states to 27.  There is a good chance that Missouri will soon become a Right to Work state.  In the 2016 election, a Republican who championed Right to Work hard won the governorship in Missouri despite the unions supplying the Democrat who opposed Right to Work with more than $10 million of campaign funds and other support.  Missouri voters returned every one of the state legislators to office who supported Right to Work.  Missouri, like other states with forced union dues collection, has been losing jobs to states with Right to Work laws.  The bordering states of Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky all have Right to Work laws.  Only the basket case state of Illinois still maintains forced unionization on its borders.

You would not know it based on the recent campaign rhetoric, but manufacturing jobs increased by 236,000 in 2016.  Despite that overall growth in manufacturing jobs, union membership decreased by 74,000.  The growth in manufacturing jobs has been in Right to Work states.  In 2016, union membership in the 25 states that were Right to Work states for the full year decreased by 290,000, falling from 7.1% to 6.5%.  Membership in forced unionization states increased by 50,000, making it clear how dependent labor unions are on forced unionization.  Union membership increased in only one-quarter of the states with Right to Work laws, while increasing in 60% of those with forced unionization.  The percentage of Michigan workers in labor unions has fallen by 2.2% since Michigan became a Right to Work state in 2013.  Government worker unions lost their privileged powers in Wisconsin in 2011 and since then union membership has fallen by 136,000 workers or by 40%!

The loss of union power over the school systems in Wisconsin since 2011 and the freeing of school systems to pay teachers on their individual merit, is improving education in those school systems that have moved to the individual merit evaluation and compensation of teachers.  A Stanford University researcher, Barbara Biasi, has found that the school systems that have chosen to stick with union-favored seniority compensation programs rather than individual merit programs are falling behind the individual merit school systems.  Governor Scott Walker's Act 10 collective bargaining reform has allowed the thinking school systems to improve.  Who would think that evaluating and rewarding individual teaching ability would improve education?  Clearly the Democrats who claimed this would undermine the government-run school system would not allow this possibility.  How surprising it is that there is a correlation between being a capable teacher and classroom manager and being capable of negotiating your own working conditions and compensation!

Why Some U.S. Companies are Fleeing to Mexico and Trump Cannot Negotiate Us Out of this Mess

In my recent 1 March post Making America Great and Donald Trump, I said

the primary reason the opening of new trade markets around the world has not led to the growth of the American economy is because the American government does not allow American businesses to be competitive.  He notes the importance of corporate tax reductions, but only after implying that bad trade negotiations caused job loses in America.  The job losses in America are due to excessive taxes, paperwork, and regulations that American businesses are hobbled with, thanks to Washington.  Business expenses are very high in America compared to many other countries in the world.  To compete, we need to be free to take full advantage of our design and innovation capabilities, while shedding governmental burdens that provide no or insufficient benefits.  We should be taking advantage of our abundance of inexpensive and reliable energy, not trying to make it more expensive as Obama has done.  We should be taking advantage of our great banking and financial companies, not smothering most of them in disabling requirements under Dodd-Frank so-called reform.  We should not be raising the cost of business with governmental dictates of minimum wages, paid leave benefits, the highest corporate and personal taxes in most of the developed nations, ObamaCare, NLRB rulings favoring forced unionization, and EPA regulations based on exaggerated claims of mercury or catastrophic man-made global warming.

The lead Opinion article in the 4 March Wall St. Journal was titled Trump on Ford and Nabisco.  Trump has been claiming that Mexico hijacked both Ford and Nabisco plants resulting in plant closings in the U.S.  Trump says this is why he "Does not mind trade wars."

The Wall St. Journal response to that is:

That's one way of looking at it.  Another way is that both companies made rational decisions to move some of their operations to Mexico because the tax and regulatory climate in the U.S. under President Obama has become increasingly hostile to business.  Before picking destructive trade fights with the world, maybe the next President could work to make America great for doing business again.

Nine production lines at the largest bakery in the world, in Chicago, are to be closed by Nabisco to build a higher technology plant in Salinas, Mexico.  Nabisco will save $46 million a year with the new plant.  Nabisco gave the labor union at the Chicago plant the opportunity to match that annual savings.  The labor union brought in a Bernie Sanders campaign official to help them.  Operating a business in Chicago is especially tough.  Illinois has unusually high corporate taxes and property taxes, not to mention very high worker's compensation expenses.  Underfunded city employee pensions are forcing taxes upward rapidly.

Nabisco is hardly alone in abandoning Chicago or Illinois.  In 2015, Illinois bucked the increase in manufacturing jobs in other nearby states by losing 56 jobs a working day.  Meanwhile, Michigan gained 74 manufacturing jobs a working day, Ohio gained 58, Indiana gained 20, and Wisconsin gained 18 manufacturing jobs a day.  The unfriendly business climate in Illinois has dire consequences.

Both Ford and General Motors are doubling their production in Mexico by 2018.  Ford is building two engine and transmission plants in Mexico and will manufacture small cars and hybrids required to meet the federally imposed fuel standard fleet requirements on all Ford vehicles manufactured.  These required small cars are money losers, so it is particularly hard to manufacture them in the U.S.

The United Auto Workers Union has won an agreement that will raise the hourly cost of wages and benefits for its members to $60, from the already very high cost of $57/hour cost for Ford and a $55/hour cost for GM.  In comparison, foreign-owned automakers in the U.S. have labor costs of about $50/hour.

In addition to lower labor costs, Mexico has free-trade agreements with 45 countries, while the U.S. has free-trade agreements with only 20 countries.  Trump clearly wants to reduce our free-trade agreements, hurting the U.S. still further in this competitive advantage.  He will drive still more plants to Mexico following his trade-war policies.

The Wall St. Journal says the way to make the U.S. economy great is to

• lower corporate and marginal tax rates
• reform pensions and entitlements
• institute right-to-work laws
• repeal ObamaCare

This sounds rather similar to what I was saying in my 1 March post.  It is not the case that we are losing jobs because China and Mexico are better negotiators and Trump can just make better deals with them.  Our problems are mostly self-made and owe to our penchant for big government that acts as a parasite sucking the life out of businesses.

American Manufacturing Companies are Expanding

According to a survey of 1,209 engineers, purchasing agents, business owners, sales and marketing executives of manufacturers, distributors, and service companies, over half of US manufacturers expanded in 2012 and nearly two-thirds expect to grow in 2013.  42% of manufacturers are increasing the size of their workforce.  Nearly 70% are introducing new products.

Prospects of future growth look good, but for one important problem.  More than 75% of manufacturing employees are 45 years old or older.  75% of the companies surveyed said only 25% or fewer of their employees were under 32 years old.  Almost half of the companies do not expect this percentage to increase over the next two years.

Those under 32 are members of Generation Y.  Most lack the skills that manufacturers need in the high technology world of modern manufacturing.  Automated production and the rapid design of new or improved products are not skills that the young possess.  What is more, the Generation Y has a bad image of manufacturing.  They have many misconceptions about it as dirty and unable to provide satisfying and well-paying careers.

Yes, some dirty manufacturing jobs still exist, but more and more, dirty is known for causing problems with the product and the high-tech equipment that makes the product.  More and more American manufacturing companies see advantages in a clean and safe workplace which enable them to compete worldwide with many companies that take the low cost and dirty route of poor-quality commodity products.  Many consumers do not want those low quality products.

Periodically, Americans see a wave of low-cost products come in from some sector of the world which is rapidly modernizing, but still far behind American companies.  For a few years they buy those products until they get tired of them failing and falling apart.  Their interest in higher quality American goods then increases, at least until the lesson has to be learned again.  In fairness, US manufacturers also periodically have to learn the lesson that they must distinguish themselves by making their product much better than that of the developing countries.

We seem to be in a time when both US companies and US consumers may be ready to contribute to a renewed resurgence of US manufacturing.  Perhaps some of Generation Y will even figure out that they should climb aboard that train.

German Manufacturing Threatened by Green Energy Costs

German energy costs have been considerably increased by the kind of green energy policies that Obama is so eager to follow.  Meanwhile, at least the cost of natural gas, which is often used in manufacturing heating applications, has come down greatly in the U.S. thanks to horizontal drilling coupled with hydraulic fracturing.  Obama is dying to regulate at the federal level rather than the state level where it is now regulated. He wants to reduce our natural gas output by hydraulic fracturing.

The much higher German manufacturing costs of energy in energy-intensive industries compared to the U.S. is causing executives at such German companies as Bayer and BASF to worry that little such future investment in plants and facilities can be made in Germany.  Manufacturing expansion will have to be in the U.S.

But wait, Obama may yet rescue German manufacturing from our competitive edge as he pursues his program to make our energy costs skyrocket.  Heaven forbid we should take advantage of an energy resource to create jobs in the U.S.!

Glacial Obama Jobs Growth Will Take a Complete Generation to Return to 5% Missing Jobs

The September employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate a glacial increase in employment.  The Obama jobs recovery over the last two years is at a rate adequate to return the U.S. to a real 5% rate of missing jobs in 18.5 years!  Add this to the four years under his presidency so far with awful unemployment and a complete generation will have passed before we return to a real 5% unemployment rate.  The real unemployment rate now is 12.88% and in September 2010 it was 13.73%.  The real rate of jobs growth under Obama in the last two years is at a rate of 0.425% a year.  Thus, to go from 12.88% missing jobs to 5.00% missing jobs will take (12.88% - 5.00%)/(0.425%/yr.) = 18.54yr.  Add the almost four years of the Obama presidency to this and one has a complete generation mired in a very sorry jobs economy.

Of course, Obama is presently holding back on many of the jobs-killing policies he wants to implement after he is re-elected.  These will likely wipe out the meager jobs growth we are presently seeing.  We also have to remember that the Federal Reserve is pouring $40 billion a month into the economy now, which should be able to purchase a few jobs upon the first pulse of that money surge.

The number of missing jobs and the real unemployment rate are given in the table below using the BLS Household Survey Data without seasonal adjustments:

The classical unemployment rate has fallen considerably, but it is substantially due to people quitting their job search.  The working age and available population increased from August to September by 206,000 people.  The number employed increased by 775,000 according to these Obama administration BLS numbers, though given the state of the economy, I find that number rather difficult to believe.  Unless, there are a lot of small business people out there who decided in September that Obama was not going to be re-elected and they are hiring on that belief!

Looking at the numbers of people unemployed, we see an even bigger decrease of 954,000 people.  If we assume that none of the 206,000 new working age people wanted jobs and 775,000 of the officially recognized unemployed found jobs, then another 179,000 people gave up looking for a job.  Does it not seem very unlikely that if 775,000 found a job in one month, that 179,000 who had just been looking for work would choose that time to stop looking for work?  There is something rather out of kilter in these numbers.  It may be that a lot more people really stopped looking for a job and decided they were by default self-employed.  These days, many of the self-employed are not able to pay themselves a salary.

But even if we use these numbers, there are 21,189,000 missing jobs now.  This is more missing jobs than were missing in September 2010!  Thanks to the population growth, the percentage of missing jobs has come down slightly though as noted above.  Here is the missing jobs chart:

Obviously the missing jobs chart does not show any major breakout in the rate of jobs creation once again in the last two and half years.

But, there may have been some jobs growth due to the decrease in savings rate and the increase in spending of Americans over the last two months.  A good part of that spending increase went to pay for higher gasoline prices, however.  The Economic Confidence Index improved in August, though many more Americans are still pessimistic about the economy than are optimistic.  The Institute for Supply Management Manufacturing Index rose to 51.5 in September from 49.6 in August, indicating expansion for the first month since May.  This expansion is based on the American economy alone, since world trade is decreasing.  Europe is importing less and while China is claiming to have a GDP growth rate of 7.5%, its real growth rate is about zero.  The service sector has been expanding all year, though it did the same in 2011.  In September, it was at 55.1 up from 53.7 in August.  Some of this service sector expansion is likely to have been generated by that $40 billion pumped into the economy in September by the Federal Reserve.  Mortgage rates have continued to fall as well and are now averaging 3.36% for a 30-year mortgage.  While mortgages are still hard to get, home sales have increased slightly.

I cannot see any reason whatsoever to give Obama any credit for the slight improvement implied by the latest jobs report, however.  We should long ago have had much better jobs growth.  Obama has worked overtime to cut down the U.S. economy with his wrongheaded economic policies.  The 1.3% GDP growth claimed in the second quarter is surely a zero or negative growth rate in terms of real real per capita GDP.  The cost of living index being used by the government understates our real cost of living so that the real GDP growth is overstated.  The adjustment for per capita GDP means that a 1% growth in GDP is just that due to the population growing at a 1% rate a year.  GDP has to grow faster than 1% so that our average standard of living will not fall.

The slightly higher 1.6% growth rate of GDP for the first half of the year is likely about a zero real real per capita growth rate.  This is a highly stagnant economy.  When Obama tries to brag about it and claim he is responsible for it, he is just showing his ignorance of the economy.  We do not have to share that ignorance.  If enough people do and he is re-elected, we will not see any significant improvement in the economy over the next four years.  His plan to increase taxes by another $1 trillion and to implement ObamaUncaringTax will be a great kick to the head for the economy.  Who knows how much more damage he will do as the rules for Dodd-Frank financial industry regulations are fixed or left unfixed so that no one can safely undertake any significant financial activity.  He is also about to march his EPA brown shirts out to strangle all coal-fired power plants and he will take more actions to generally impede the use of fossil fuels.  Of course, he will also continue the mal-investment of our tax money in impractical green energy schemes doomed to failure and run by his parasitic campaign donors.

GDP and Industrial Output Comparisons by Country

I needed to find out if China was the number 1 manufacturing nation in the world or was it the United States?  This proved a bit more difficult question than I thought it would be.  But the CIA World Factbook had the information needed to determine this and to calculate the actual value of each of the three sectors into which they divide the GDP for the year 2010.  These sectors are Agriculture, Industry, and Services.  The results I found for the 7 nations with the largest GDPs expressed in dollars with purchasing power parity are given in the following table:

 

The answer to my original question is that the value of China's industrial output, which includes mining and construction, is $4.73 trillion, while that for the United States is $3.24 trillion.  China's industrial output is 46% greater than that of the United States.  No other nation comes close to having so much industrial output as China or the United States.  The value of China's agricultural output is also the largest in the world.  In this case, it is 6 times that of the United States.  It is the delivery of services that the U.S. excels in doing.

The per capital GDP for the United States is more than 6 times that of China.  Germany has the second highest per capita GDP on the list and that of the U.S. is 32% higher.  The United Kingdom and Japan both have per capita GDPs very nearly as great as that of Germany.  This group has a per capita GDP more than twice that of Russia, whose per capita GDP is more than twice that of China, whose per capita GDP is more than twice that of India.

13.47% Unemployment with Glacially Slow Improvement

The so-called unemployment rate of 8.66%, without seasonal adjustment, or the 9.0% unemployment rate with seasonal adjustment, remains virtually meaningless.  As I do most months, I will calculate the number of missing jobs based on the percentage of Americans who wanted to work when jobs were plentiful and desirable in January 2000.  The result is that the real unemployment rate in April 2011 is 13.47%, which is down from March 2011 when it was 13.86%.  In January 2011, it was still worse at 14.59%.  We are presently missing 21,739,000 jobs.  This is 868,000 more missing jobs than in April of 2010.  Clearly, while the recent real unemployment rate is falling, it is doing so with glacial slowness and our jobs recession is still very much bearing down on us.

The graph of missing jobs going back to November 2009 is updated below:

We made progress to some degree in job creation because the U.S. manufacturing base is doing relatively well compared to the rest of the world.  We are very competitive.  Take a look at this chart from the JPMorgan Global PMI Report of 3 May in which values over 50 represent expansion:

As we see, U.S. manufacturing output dipped lower at the end of 2008 and the start of 2009 than that of China, the U.K., and the Eurozone, though not so deep as Japan.  Since then, U.S. manufacturing output has rebounded strongly, despite the federal government's best efforts to squeeze it dry with excessive regulations and taxes.  We now have the highest corporate taxes in the developed world.  Corporate taxes are particularly onerous as a double tax, since shareholders are taxed again on their dividends and any capital gains and prices of sold goods and services are raised to consumers.  Despite this, American manufacturers are making an heroic effort, which is much under-appreciated.  U.S. manufacturing output fell in April relative to March, but we are still beating the Eurozone, China, and Japan.  This is why manufacturing employment rose by 29,000 in April.  The drop in the manufacturing output in April may have been due to a lack of parts from Japan and sharp increases in many commodity prices in April.  Monetary tightening in China contributed to the downturn there.

The manufacturing employment index from the JPMorgan report is also interesting, with values greater than 50 indicating expansion again:

Manufacturing unemployment took a deeper dip in the U.S. than anywhere in this Great Socialist Recession, but since early 2010, U.S. manufacturers have beaten the Eurozone, China, and Japan in increasing manufacturing employment.  This has been done because U.S. manufacturers have been increasing the productivity per employee and increasing exports.  The manufacturing export index is shown below:

Note that the manufacturing export index for the U.S. did not dip as low as those for China, the Eurozone, and Japan at the worst of the recession and that we now and recently have been beating out the Eurozone by a hair and China and Japan more handily.  Some of this expansion, however, is driven by the lower value of the dollar.  Caterpillar Inc. is selling construction equipment abroad at record rates, especially excavators and underground mining trucks.  Heavy spending on infrastructure in Latin America and Asia is especially a factor in these sales.  About 90% of their large mining trucks are exported.  In the U.S., severe environmental regulations and constant lawsuits are crimping our mining operations despite strong demand for metals and materials.  Since the low point in employment in mining in October 2009, employment has increased by 107,000 jobs in mining.  Crown Equipment Corp. manufactures forklifts and is reporting strong sales abroad as well.

Construction spending is also increasing in the U.S.  It increased by 1.4% in March.  The increase in the private sector was higher at 2.2%.  Construction employment was unchanged in April, however.  It has been very flat since early 2010.  In April, retail trade employment increased by 57,000, professional and business services by 51,000, leisure and hospitality by 46,000, and health care by 37,000 jobs.  The information, financial, and transportation and warehousing industries remained unchanged in employment numbers.  Fortunately, the number employed in state and local governments decreased somewhat.

First quarter 2011 output per hour worked productivity was 1.3% higher than it had been in the first quarter of 2010, but this continued a trend since the first quarter of 2010 of smaller and smaller productivity gains.  Companies are struggling to increase productivity further with the already very lean workforces they have.

Comments on California's Plight

We have heard a great deal about California's budget and revenue problems at the state government level recently. Government spending is clearly out of control. But there are other problems as well. The 29 August - 4 September issue of the Economist, notes that

Byzantine regulations, high and complex taxes and legislative gridlock are driving out businesses, while high personal taxes are driving out the rich and a disintegrating social safety net is pushing away the poor.

The Milken Institute reports that California is losing its manufacturing industries to such states as Arizona, Nevada, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, and Washington. It says that California would have had to create another 1.2 million jobs between 2000 and 2007 than it did to have maintained its population relative to that of the rest of the United States. Total migration to California has been positive since 1996 due to foreign immigrants, but the state has a net outward migration of U.S. citizens.

The biggest single reason for this is housing affordability, but housing costs are so high because the same socialist/environmentalist cabal that is causing California's other problems is causing the limited land available for housing to rise in cost to unholy heights. The poorer citizens are the most likely to leave the state. 1.73 households paying little in taxes are leaving for each such new low income household entering the state. Among the richest state citizens, 1.09 households are leaving for each household arriving.

Is the real socialist/environmentalist aim to cause the poor to leave your state and move to another state? Environmentalists do seem to be very fond of wishing for population reduction! If so, they are apparently succeeding in California.

States Hardest Hit by Carbon Cap and Trade

The carbon cap and trade bill which passed the House and is awaiting consideration by the Senate will have a very uneven impact on the various states. A very simple formula using the % of a states workers in manufacturing multiplied times the % of the state's electricity generated from coal was used to evaluate the impact state by state of Waxman-Markey.

The twenty most badly hurt states will be:

Pennsylvania
West Virginia
North Carolina
Georgia
Alabama
Tennessee
Kentucky
Ohio
Michigan
Indiana
Illinois
Wisconsin
Minnesota
Iowa
Missouri
Arkansas
Kansas
Nebraska
North Dakota
Utah

The ten next worst hit states are:

Delaware
Virginia
South Carolina
Mississippi
Texas
Oklahoma
South Dakota
Wyoming
Colorado
New Mexico

I cannot imagine anyone in these states voting for Democrats in the 2010 election or in the 2012 election. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the average family will experience an increase in their energy costs of $1,300. The impact in the first 20 states above will be greater than that. The harm the Democrats are trying to do is just too transparent, so strongly motivated by a lust for power, and in such disregard for science, that by election time in 2010 anyone not brain-dead will be in a rage against the Democrats. If the People are worthy of any respect, they will turn massively against the Democrats in at least the 20 hardest hit states and that should be enough to throw them out of power in the House in the 2010 election and both the House and Senate by the 2012 election. This is not even counting the mounting fury over the Democrat attempted takeover of the health care industries.