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News & ArtsFriday, October 5, 2012
2012 / Economy No President Since FDR Has Won Reelection with Unemployment Above 7.2 Percent
Posted by Goldy on Fri, Oct 5, 2012 at 8:48 AM
In evaluating the new jobs and unemployment numbers, it's important to remember that jobs and unemployment are not the same thing. Often, the unemployment rate falls when discouraged workers just give up looking for work. But that's not what these numbers reflect:
The unemployment rate fell by 0.3 percentage points in September to 7.8 percent, the lowest level since January of 2009. The drop was driven by an 873,000 reported increase in employment. The employment to population ratio rose to 58.7 percent, its highest rate since May of 2010. While the establishment survey showed just 114,000 new jobs for the month, the prior two months’ numbers were revised upwardby a total of 86,000. This brings the average rate of job growth over the last three months to 146,000.
[...] The percentage of unemployment due to quitters rose to 7.9 percent, the second highest level since the end of 2008. The number of discouraged workers also fell sharply from 1,032,000 to 802,000.
As Charles has already mentioned, the conspiracy theorists on the right are already accusing the administration of cooking the books, but these initial reports are always preliminary, and the subsequent revisions are always more accurate. Both the August and July numbers have been revised sharply upwards, suggesting that the economy has been doing a little better than these reports had been indicating. That may help explain why consumer confidence has been steadily rising, defying the expectations of economists.
Conspiracy theories aside, jobs numbers don't drive consumer confidence. Actual jobs do.
All that said, Republicans can find solace in the factoid that no president since FDR has won reelection with an unemployment rate above 7.2 percent. But then, that was in the midst of the Great Depression, so perhaps the Great Recession gives President Obama a similar cushion?
UPDATE: Josh Marshall at TPM adds this observation:
Around six weeks ago and particularly after the conventions, both campaigns started noticing that public perceptions of the economy were on the upswing. But neither campaign had a clear sense of why that was happening.
[...] Politically, we’ve been operating on the assumption that the economy got into gear last winter and then slumped back into anemic jobs growth in the spring. But it seems like on the ground that may not actually have happened. So if we wonder why Obama’s numbers have resisted the anemic jobs reality, it seems like we may have had an incorrect picture of what that reality was.
As Goldy points out, while no president has won reelection with unemployment above 7.2% since Roosevelt, no president has faced a global financial crisis on this scale since the Great Depression.
The Republican operatives like to say that under the "Reagan recovery" job growth was stronger, but they're not stupid. They know full well that the recession Reagan faced was kids' stuff compared with a financial crisis that, but for extreme measures by both the Bush and Obama administrations and Congress, would have been another full-bore Great Depression.
Are the Republicans literally lying when they try to pin the slow recovery on Obama? Suffice it to say they are now incapable of making an honest political argument considering all the false premises their arguments are based on. And in trying to respond to those arguments, you could spend all your time just peeling away all the layers of deception. (Look, I just tried to address one myth.) Bill Clinton in his speech managed to peel away all those layers; Obama hardly bothered--in his convention speech or the debate.
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There are lots of random presidential records out there.
Records were made to be broken.
"On the establishment side, by far the biggest job gainer was health care, which added 43,500 jobs in the month."
Didn't Republicans say nobody would want to get into Health Care because they couldn't make any money under Obamacare? Didn't they say Dr's would all quit and we couldn't get anybody to go to school for all those years to get into the industry? Didn't they say it would destroy the health care industry?
Where's the destruction? Where are the quitting Dr's? The industry seems just fine under Obamacare.
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At the point the ground feels solid to business, it's off to the races on all fronts. Jobs, salaries, stock prices for consumer products go up.
Whether that happens before or after the end of October when people get their mail-in ballots will determine the winner.
"Often, the unemployment rate falls when discouraged workers just give up looking for work."
They've never, I repeat for all ignorant dipshits, never had a valid method for taking an accurate statistical sampling of this ("discouraged workers just give up" bullcrap!), they just assign it to their assumptions, butthole! Do you copy??
Speaking of conspiracy theories, sonny, when the f**k are you going to learn something about economics, since you sound off ignorantly about it so often?
Reality Economics for Truth Seekers
The last several weeks I've heard over 40 people, and several Brits, on various news shows either incorrectly --- or falsely --- claim that the American economy is a consumer-based economy.
Wrong, wrong and wrong --- hasn't been such since at least 1999.
Today, the top 5 banksters in America account for the majority of the GDP, not only is this wrong in and of itself that such should be, but it's based upon a financial scam.
The banksters' creation, ownership and control of over $100 trillion worth of credit derivatives gives them that majority of the GDP --- the same credit derivatives which Bernanke's Federal Reserve buys up with his QEI, II and III --- naming them toxic assets and allowing the banks to create the next wave of credit derivatives.
Based upon these toxic assets/credit derivatives these banks peddle goods and services which make up a portion of that 70% consumption figure of the American economy we are always hearing stated --- yet we never hear the breakdown of that 70% consuming figure.
The vast majority of that 70% consumption derives from the top 20% of the population --- decidedly not the majority, simply the wealthiest, the logical outcome of the super-concentration of wealth predicated on the American fantasy-finance based economy.
It is really that simple.
(Real unemployment in America, something which hasn't been remotely accurate since at least the Reagan Administration, has been above 20% --- probably much higher than that --- for quite a few years now. Any other number doesn't correlate to indicators for homelessness, food stamp usage, and the latest Census stats: 1 out of every 2 Americans at the low-income, poverty or below-poverty levels, etc.)
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On their unicorns.
And exactly how many incumbent presidents have actually faced this situation? Seems like important information to include...
Expect a baby boom 6 months from now. There's a lot of pent up 'demand'.
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They've never, I repeat for all ignorant dipshits, never had a valid method for taking an accurate statistical sampling of this ("discouraged workers just give up" bullcrap!), they just assign it to their assumptions, butthole!
Hate to break it to you, but just cuz YOU don't know about it or how it all works, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. (Shocking, I know!)
It's called U-6, and it's a measure of "total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers"
Those marginally attached and discouraged workers (aka: your "discouraged workers just give up bullcrap") are --as you could see if you followed the link above-- defined as follows:
"Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months.
"Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work.
"Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule. "
And we've been measuring them in the unemployment survey* since the 40's, ya worthless ignorant dipshit!
* And note: it's a real survey ; they actually call households and ask if people are working or not, looking for work, discouraged from looking, etc. (see: http://www.bls.gov/cps/faq.htm#Ques2 )
Nate Silver: "Historically, there has been no relationship at all between the unemployment rate on Election Day and the incumbent's performance. However, there has been a relationship between the change in the unemployment rate in the months leading up to the election and how well the incumbent does.(emphasis mine)
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