People who know David Axelrod say he’s in a state of panic, and it’s only partly over President Obama’s dismal debate performance against Mitt Romney last week. The bigger worry for the president’s top political guru is the economy, and Obama’s utter inability to spin a positive tale about it.
You saw the same concern in the cheering on the left over last week’s unemployment number — finally dipping below 8 percent for the first time in almost four years. The problem is, people vote on the evidence of what they see around them, not on numbers from Washington — and the federal jobs figures are always a weak reflection of reality.
AP
Jobs not created or saved: Bankrupt Solyndra is the poster child for the stimulus’ failure — but Obama also can’t point to any green-jobs success.
Worse, for Obama and the nation, better indicators of the economy’s health suggest things are headed down, not up. In other words, nearly four years of Obamanomics is pushing us back into the ditch.
First off, the jobless stats: The fact is, the government doesn’t have data good enough to authoritatively tell us how many people were looking for work last month; these numbers are always revised in later reports.
Anyway, they don’t count folks who’ve given up looking for work — and the broader measure that does (known as the long-term “U-6” unemployment rate) is still stuck around 15 percent.
More important, some other fairly reliable statistics are ominous. One is the rate of growth in corporate profits, where a building consensus is that earnings from major companies are heading back to levels not seen since 2009, when the country was just coming out of the Great Recession.
A recent report from Factset, a well-regarded company that tracks corporate earnings, estimates that the earnings growth rate for the third quarter is a negative 2.7 percent. If so, that would put an end to 11 straight quarters of earnings growth for major corporations.
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