Here’s a fact you’re going to love. Obama has a 79.8% chance of being re-elected according to 538.com Sept. 8: Conventions May Put Obama in Front-Runner's Position - The New York Times
Other than that, the fact that the August jobs numbers, while modest are the best in Job creation figures for the month of August in 6 years makes all your calculations rather quaint. But really, knock yourself out.
August 2007- US lost 18,000 jobs
August 2008 US lost 274,000 jobs
August 2009 US lost 231,000 jobs
August 2010 US lost 51,000 jobs
August 2011 US GAINS 85,000 jobs
August 2012 US GAINS 96,000 jobs
Source
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001?output_view=net_1mth
August doesn’t seem to be historically a great month for Job Creation, regardless if you’re in a boom cycle or not.
It really is scary when you realize that you simply epitomize the large number of uninformed, Democratic voters.
Again, I’m going to have to point out to you the above statistic in of itself means nothing-- especially since it’s not enough to keep up with population growth or the number of new people who enter the labor market every month. Really. Stop using it. It just makes you look like (well, shows*) you have a minimal understanding of what you’re talking about. There are far more important statistics one should look at when determining whether or not we’re actually doing “better”, those being the labor force participation rate, the employment-to population ratio, mean income and types of jobs being created.
To find out if we’re better off now than in August 2010 all you have to do is compare the number today to number pre-recession (or even during the recession). If you had the least bit of intellectual honesty and did so you would find that right now there is no way in hell you could say we’re better off.
-Both in absolute numbers and as a percentage, there are more discouraged workers (people who have given up looking for work) now than pre-recession or during the recession.
-The unemployment rate is only going downwards because so many people-- mainly young people (<30)-- are simply dropping out of the labor force.
-A fewer percentage of Americans have jobs right now (58.3%) than ANYTIME during the “Great Recession”. Let that sink in for a moment.
-And, finally, most of your new jobs are being created in low-wage occupation (i.e., retail sales, food services, telemarketing, etc.) while most of your jobs are being lost in higher-wage occupations. In other words, we’re simply replacing high-end jobs with low-end ones.
But, in the world of Democrats, that constitutes progress or something.
:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
What really boggles the mind is the number of people who will go on about Bush or what Obama had to work with while simultaneously refusing to look where we are now to where we were last year or any years preceding it. You can CLEARLY see a negative trend (well, except in the number of Americans on food stamps; that’s going up :p).
And yet in your OBTUSE statistical world where your boy mocks Global Warming, flip flops on Health Care, and bites his own VP in the ass, you’re hung up on stats that take you into a uselessness vortex
You can quibble and argue over whether job growth that is lower than population growth represents a ‘gain’ or not. In my experience, whether you conclude that depends on whether or not your political party is in the White House. When Bush was in power, we had this exact discussion in reverse, with board liberals claiming that job growth below population growth was actually a loss in jobs, and board conservatives arguing the opposite.
What can’t be argued though, is that the post-recession job growth in the U.S. is pathetic, and shows no sign of being improved by all the interventions the liberals claimed would fix the economy. It’s also much worse than the White House anticipated - they promised, by their own models, a ‘V’ shaped recovery in which the strength of the recovery would offset the size of the initial recession. They were wrong.
The Obama administration promised very high rates of economic growth by this point after the recession. In fact, this ‘recovery’ has the lowest GDP growth of any recession in modern history: Chart: Economic Growth 3 years after a major recession
They also made very specific promises about the stimulus, which were wrong - even if you factor in the ‘surprisingly worse conditions we found after the fact’, the model is still wrong.
The administration also made specific promises about how many ‘green jobs’ there would be at this time, and that was a humiliating disaster. Despite billions of dollars being thrown at the ‘green economy’, virtually no jobs were created at all, except for growing the bureaucracy.
The administration also made claims about ‘cash for clunkers’ and other stimulus programs that turned out to be wrong. Rather than stimulating new car sales, all the program did was shift them around in time a bit, at the cost of adding 10 billion dollars to the debt and forcing the destruction of billions of dollars in 2nd tier used cars. That represents real wealth stripped out of the economy.
And even though Democrats are trumpeting the auto bailout as a major success, it’s far from clear that it is. GM’s stock is tanking, the highly subsidized Chevy Volt is a flop, and the healthiest car maker in America is the only one that didn’t take a bailout. It seems likely to me that if GM had been allowed to go through a normal bankruptcy process, it might have been restructured in a much healthier way. And if it had gone under, that would mean more market share for Ford and Nissan and Toyota, which seem to be run better than GM and all of which are providing more compelling products.
But of course, we’ll never know the path not taken, so we can’t prove that there was a better way than the bailout. And that’s all the slack the Democrats need to claim it was a big success.
Given all this, it’s extremely hard to buy into the notion that America is on the right path, that Obama’s grand vision just hasn’t been given enough time to work, etc.
You would expect an incumbent president with this dismal of a track record to focus his re-election campaign on a new strategy, complete with specifics. It seems to me that his job should be to explain to people what went wrong, and what his plan is to change things so that his second term isn’t a repeat of the first. Instead, Obama gave a speech filled with lofty rhetoric and platitudes. Biden’s speech was basically, “We’re AMERICANS, damn it! We can DO this!”. No where did I see concrete proposals substantially different than what was already tried.
News here.
In summary, 114K jobs added, new unemployment rate is 7.8%, and the July and August estimates were revised upwards by about 86K new jobs.
Is this the final jobs report before the election? And will this take some of the sting from what is regarded as a poor debate performance for the president?
And we now have the September jobs report - the penultimate report before the election. Data and graphs here.
Jobs growth was 114,000, in line with expectations, but still only in the range needed to keep up with the growing population. However, July and August were both revised upwards significantly, July from 141,000 to 181,000 and August from 96,000 to 142,000.
The unemployment rate fell substantially from 8.1% to 7.8%. This puts unemployment below the 8% mark that has often been quoted as being a barrier to reelection.
So how will this play? Job growth was still fairly anemic, but the revisions of previous months put them in the range of real job growth. Headline unemployment has fallen dramatically, and this time (unlike last month) is not caused by a decrease in the labor force participation.
Overall, I expect the Democrats to get a lot more out of this than the Republicans.
There’s an October report due out right before the election.
This sort of kills the “XX many months unemployment above 8% line”. I guess they can say 7% or 7.5% or something.
Naturally, the usual suspects will insist that the numbers are all fake and were cooked to rig the election.
It will deprive Romney of his monthly “sprint to the microphone and smirk” strategy. Getting below 8% is a huge step. This really undercuts the whole rationale for Romney’s candidacy- you don’t need a surgeon if the patient is getting better on his own.
As I understand, another one will be released Nov. 2.
My prediction that no one will care about the last debate after the job report today seems to be bearing fruit.
It wasn’t until I read my own posts that I realized this was a resurrected thread on the subject.
I think the hay is in the barn at this point, since the Nov jobs report will be too close to the election to make much of a difference. Does anyone really make a decision a day before the election? At any rate, I think this is about a net ZERO for Obama, and that’s good since there was a real likelihood that it could have been a disaster. This is the slow growth that people have gotten used to, so it’s not likely to make major headlines. Of course, Obama would have had a huge spike in support if the number was closer to 250k, but I don’t think anyone believed that would happen.
Really? You can tell this a few minutes after the jobs report is out? Color me skeptical.
Waiting for some contard to insist that scheduling was arranged just for Obama’s benefit . . .
It’s the top story on Google News. Dunno if you think that constitutes “major headlines” or not.
Actually, I thought the comment was on target. For months now, as each report came out Romney would sprint to the nearest microphone and smirk his lying ass off. Now the big story as we end the news week is the rate dipping below 8% for the first time in over three years. It’s going to lift the stock market and boost consumer confidence. Having the populace feel good is the last thing that Romney wants.
And that means no one will be talking about the debate later today or this weekend? (BTW, your post isn’t in line with what the actual prediction was.)
My prediction, and I’ll put money on this, is that the weekend talk shows (like Meet the Press) will headline the debate, not the jobs report.
Any takers?
Once again this morning I find myself agreeing with John. This doesn’t take the wind out of the debate sail (only the next debate will do that).
However, what it does do is remove one of Romney’s few remaining opportunities. He could have really used a combination of a strong debate and a bad jobs report to get the “Obama campaign reeling” and “Romney comeback” narratives going strong. He really needs to get the “who do you think will win the election” number closer to even.
What? This post reads like a non sequitur to me. I was addressing your comment that you didn’t feel the jobs story would make major headlines. I didn’t say anything about the debates.
:smack: My bad. I assumed you were talking about my second comment.
But, yeah, that was stupid of me to say it wouldn’t make major headlines. What I meant was that it wouldn’t bump the debate discussion from the spotlight.
ETA: And I didn’t see that the story also contains the “tidbit” that the unemployment rate is 7.8%. That’s huge, and will make some major headlines. Much more significant than the number of jobs added.
Save this kind of stuff for the Pit, please.
Wow. The 7.8% number is the best news for Obama in months. It may seem weird to call 7.8% unemployment good news, but busting through the 8% barrier is psychological gold.