The Election, Unemployment and the Economy

I think most of us agree that for except for the ideology oriented voters, the state of the economy is the primary issue in this pivotal Presidential election which will conclude Tuesday night as election returns come in from across the country and this Nation will know who will be our leader for the next four years.

One of the key numbers or statistics from which many people judged the economy is the unemployment rate. Obama promised the country a rate below 8% and for much if his term it has been above 10%.

Changs in the way the government cacluates the unemployment rate, not counting people who have been unemployed for double digit months then giving up looking for work are no longer calculated.

With all other indicators such as gross numbers of people losing their jos, people starting work and the Country's growth rate at very dismal numbers, imagine the suprise economists had when the Government announced that September's numbers brought the National employment rate from 8.1% to 7.8%, a unprecedented drop especially given other dismal economic figures.

Now we know the raw numbers for September of over 400,000 people losing their jobs and only 140,000 people fidning work. Yet the Government figure for the unemployment rate go in the opposite direction.

Today we received the figures for October, from a Fox News article:

The final monthly jobs report before Election Day offered a mixed bag of numbers that would surely become political putty for the presidential candidates, with the unemployment rate ticking up to 7.9 percent but the economy adding a better-than-average 171,000 jobs.

The October numbers allow President Obama to argue the economy is technically growing under his watch. At the same time, they allow Mitt Romney to argue that the new jobs are not making much of a dent in the unemployment problem.

While 171,000 jobs were added in October, the number of unemployed grew by roughly the same amount -- to 12.3 million.

Both candidates are expected to address the report at campaign stops Friday, four days before the election.