Posted on 03/16/2011 6:06:46 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
President Obama may be closing out his campaign for a second term with the nation's unemployment rate standing at 7.7 percent, according to a new survey.
A survey of economists conducted by the Wall Street Journal predicts that the president will be dealing with a jobless rate that would be the highest in a presidential election month since Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford in 1976.
The 54 economists, echoing recent comments from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, expect the unemployment rate to decline from the current 8.9 percent in the coming months, but at a slow, deliberate pace.
And while a 7.7 percent rate would fall on the high end of the scale for presidential elections, the article points out that the trend of that rate, rather than just the number, is a factor for the incumbent at the ballot box.
The unemployment rate was 7.5 percent when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter in 1980. While slightly lower than when he was elected, Carter was ousted while the rate was on the upswing, having increased from a low of 5.6 percent earlier in his term.
On the other hand, Reagan won re-election in 1984 with a 7.2 percent unemployment rate in the background, but he was able to campaign on the headwind provided by its decrease -- it peaked at 10.8 percent in 1982.
predicated on driving millions more out of the job market and therefore no longer having to count them as “unemployed”
Yeah...I’m sure the Dems wil jigger the numbers..to get 7%...while the real number will be three times that.
Look for them to try to interfere with the unemployed’s voting rights...
It appears that the private sector is healing a bit and able to hire some folks. The public sector, however, now must align its work force with it revenue stream. That stream dropped significantly due to the disappearance of stimulus money, and loss of sales tax and income tax revenues. There will be layoffs at the state and local level. 7.7% may be somebody’s pipe dream.
The Labor Dept. which works for Obama can make up whatever rate they want to.
I actually believe this. They already dropped it from 9.8% in November to 8.9% in March while creating only 300,000 jobs. Easy stuff.
The real number is jobs. Barry is still down 3 million jobs from 01/20/09. He can’t massage this number.
They are still very bad numbers and i bet they are worse than that.
Obama got straight A’s in Book Cooking at the UCSGG. University of Chicago school of Government Graft.
Amazing how the percent drops — especially when the BLS drops about 3 million unemployed from the countable numbers.
Maybe alien abductions?
Bank on this: They will find ways to drop more to get the number to 8% or less.
He has to be below 8% so it will be below 8. A month or two after the election they will revise the number upward. We need to push the real number, claims and those who quit looking. That is about 16-17% right now and will probably decline very little by 2012.
Every administration uses the more favorable U-3 numbers, rather than the more accurate U-6 numbers.
ahhhh, Economists. If it weren’t for them we might not even have the word “unexpected”
I predict a lot of “ unexpected’s “ in economic reports between now and November 2012.
Agree, but we can still keep raising the U-6 number. It’s like the Fed saying inflation is almost zero because they don’t count fuel and food.
I think they are smoking crack pipes, unemployment in Memphis is about 10% and not going to come down any time soon.
The administration will be heavily cooking the numbers. Of course the news media will provide cover by happily reporting and ‘finding’ evidence along with anedotal stories to back up the numbers. I can see it now, some guy in OH that lost his high paying job under Bush now has a higher paying job with a government program thanks to Obama.
The repubs should be ready to counter this propaganda but won’t.
Well, a unicorn and a car both have horns, but other than that, I don’t see unicorns replacing cars.
I would grant them some degree of creditability if any of their funded programs had come close to achieving a measurable result. But to date they can only point to conditions that didn't get worse.
Since when has limiting a failure to a lesser degree of failure been defined as a success?
The U-6 has been going down as well. Discouraged workers and part time for economic reasons have both dropped since last year.
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