danivon wrote:The MCSI is a statistic. The car sales figure are statiistics.

I don't bat down statistics with opinions, I'm asking you to provide more substance to your claim of a fiddled job report than that you don't like the numbers.

Meanwhile, General Motors said its sales rose 1.5 percent to 210,245 vehicles, its highest September U.S. sales since 2008.

freeman2 wrote:Well one thing is for sure--breaking the 8% barrier is a nice boost to Obama. It may not mean much in real terms, but psychologically it was good for Obama for unemployment to get under 8%.DF's conspiracy theories are, well, unproven. And please don't bother arguing about it DF with me--I don't care and I'm pretty sure you know that contesting that 7.8% number is not going to be effective. I am sure you have plenty of right-wing friends you can grouse about it with.

Doctor Fate wrote:In true Danivon fashion, I decline to do your work.

Rising property values, higher stock prices and a stabilization in the cost of gasoline may be combining to lift sentiment. At the same time, unemployment stuck above 8 percent and stagnant incomes are restraints for households, whose spending makes up about 70 percent of the economy.

Ray Jay wrote:By the way, the unemployment rate is determined by a household survey of about 50,000 homes. So, it is not unusual for it to move around a bit. If people pick up a part time job, they are NOT counted as unemployed.

There's also the question of whether ACA is driving employers to NOT hire full time employees.

danivon wrote:

Ray Jay wrote:By the way, the unemployment rate is determined by a household survey of about 50,000 homes. So, it is not unusual for it to move around a bit. If people pick up a part time job, they are NOT counted as unemployed.

That's about 50x larger than the normal political opinion poll (and if the sample is reasonably representative, that makes some difference to margins of error).

There's also the question of whether ACA is driving employers to NOT hire full time employees.

How? Unfortunately, it's common that new jobs created after recessions are of lower value than those before. A career break makes someone less desirable, retraining means they start at the beginning again. Cautious employers use more casual terms.

Also, a lot of companies who don't want to lose staff expertise but don't have the work will ask people to reduce their hours.

So, what over and above those factors does the ACA do?

Ray Jay wrote:I don't disagree, but a reasonably representative sample can be challenging. The unemployment rate traditionally moves around quite a bit. I don't think that is a controversial point.

Well, there are seasonal effects (yes, the figures will be seasonally adjusted, but there's no way to completely iron out such variation), and also the interplay between agricultural work and non-agricultural. There always will be wobbles in the data too, and so it will indeed be interesting to see what the next set of figures brings.

I think those are good points. Re ACA, under certain situations, there's a penalty of $2,000 per full time un-insured employee starting in 2014. I don't know whether that influences employers today. I'm just asking the question.

Ray Jay wrote:

freeman2 wrote:Well one thing is for sure--breaking the 8% barrier is a nice boost to Obama. It may not mean much in real terms, but psychologically it was good for Obama for unemployment to get under 8%.DF's conspiracy theories are, well, unproven. And please don't bother arguing about it DF with me--I don't care and I'm pretty sure you know that contesting that 7.8% number is not going to be effective. I am sure you have plenty of right-wing friends you can grouse about it with.

I agree it is good news for Obama. There's one more unemployment report which comes out a few days before the election. If that goes back to 8% it will be tough on Obama. If it stays the same (or goes lower) he will get a (big) boost. If team Obama were to cook the books, I would think they would wait until next month.

freeman2 wrote:It appears that economists don't think that Romney is that great on the economy....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/0 ... 36522.html

But whom would the experts pick? To find out, The Economist polled hundreds of professional academic and business economists. Our main finding should hearten Mr Obama. By a large margin they rate his overall economic plan more highly than Mr Romney’s, credit him with a better grasp of economics, and think him more likely to appoint a good economic team (see chart). They do not hold the perpetually disappointing recovery against him; half of respondents graded his record as good or very good, compared with just 5% who said that about George Bush in our poll four years ago. “It all depends on the counterfactual,” said Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, referring to how bad things might have been without the president’s emergency measures.

But Mr Romney can take heart from a deeper dive into the numbers. The Economist polled two groups: research associates of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the country’s leading organisation of academic economists; and the outlook panel of the National Association for Business Economics. The academics gave Mr Obama much higher marks than Mr Romney, which may in part reflect partisan preference: fully 45% of them identified themselves as Democrats, and just 7% as Republicans.

By contrast, the forecasters, a much less partisan crowd, consistently assigned Mr Romney higher scores. Democrats and Republicans were equally represented in this group, at 22% each. Roughly half of both groups were either independent or declined to state an affiliation. Among these independents, and these are probably the most compelling numbers, Mr Obama’s platform still got a higher grade than Mr Romney’s, but by a much smaller margin than in the group as a whole. The independents, by a slim margin, thought Mr Obama would name a better economic team, but also believed that Mr Romney has the better grasp of economics.