Potentially Devastating News On The Obama Economy

The Gallup Organization had some bad news for Barack Obama on Friday. It’s not that Obama fell behind Mitt Romney by two points in Gallup’s daily tracking poll, although that couldn’t have helped the the O-Team’s spirits heading into the weekend. Between now and the election, polls are likely to be less stable than Joe Biden’s thought process.

The really bad news for the Chicago mob is that Gallup’s unemployment survey shows the Obama economy is getting even worse. Gallup reported an uptick in joblessness in their latest survey of 30,000 households.

“(T)his suggests that the government’s unadjusted unemployment rate could increase to 8.7% … The government’s measurement of the unadjusted unemployment rate has been known to differ with Gallup’s findings, but a drop of 0.3% … is necessary to bring the government’s unadjusted rate down to Gallup levels.”

However, the figure that is most commonly used in reporting joblessness is the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s (BLS’s) seasonally adjusted rate. Of that rate, Gallup notes:

“More interestingly, there were no BLS seasonal adjustments in August 2011. If this remains the same in 2012, the Gallup seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for August would be 8.3% while that of the BLS would be 8.7%, assuming a similar increase to that shown in the Gallup data.”