Sunday, September 7, 2008

Misery

UPDATE: Welcome digby readers...please take a look around...our speciality is debunking the lies about Obama and McCain's economic policies. See for example: here and here



Faux conservative blowhard Stephen Colbert kept rudely interrupting his guest Laura Tyson last week before she got to talk about the misery index. With Friday's jobs report, the misery index (sum of inflation and unemployment) has reached levels not seen since ... George Herbert Walker Bush was President.

...does McCain still think the fundamentals of the economy are strong?

(The current reading of 11.9 percent assumes August CPI rise by 0.3 percent --the average monthly increase over the last two years)

3 comments:

Don Pedro said...

Great graph. George Bush still may top his dad before leaving office.

Seems like this would be a good thing for the Democrats to keep pointing out.

Don Pedro said...

Lerxst,
How exactly did you calculate this? Are these monthly unemployment figures and then average inflation over the previous 12 months?

Anonymous said...

dp,

its the monthly unemployment rate plus year over year growth in cpi (headline). Both from BLS and available on their website. Since the august 2008 cpi isn't out yet I extrapolated the august number.

(Aug 08 is 6.1 (UR) + 5.8 (CPI growth)