Nancy Pelosi wants to scare the crap out of you, so her office has released the above scary graph, which we bring to you by way of Time’s Swampland blog.

Here’s what Pelosi’s office has to say about their work. (The graph uses “actual job-loss data,” from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

This chart compares the job loss so far in this recession to job losses in the 1990-1991 recession and the 2001 recession — showing how dramatic and unprecedented the job loss over the last 13 months has been. Over the last 13 months, our economy has lost a total of 3.6 million jobs – and continuing job losses in the next few months are predicted.

By comparison, we lost a total of 1.6 million jobs in the 1990-1991 recession, before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing; and we lost a total of 2.7 million jobs in the 2001 recession, before the economy began turning around and jobs began increasing.

Time’s readers quickly got to work debunking the graph for not taking into account the difference in population, though it seems that they ultimately concluded that this recession is the worst since 1974-1975, and may likely be even crappier than that.

What do you think? What’s that? It’s so hard to understand you when you’ve got your hands shoved in your mouths to stop the screams from escaping.

How Bad Is It? [Time via Buzzfeed]
MORE: How Bad Is It? [Time]

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