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Sunday, January 10, 2010

Start Watching The Misery Index

 If you think the Misery Index looks bad now, or good if you are a GOPer or conservative, wait till our current inflationary policies really heat up which some say will soon happen with a vengeance! Here’s more on the index:

The number Democrats should fear the most by Ed Lasky at americanthinker.com: But there is another number Democrats should fear because it was used by them and then against them three decades ago. This number is  the misery index and was used by Jimmy Carter to help him defeat Gerald Ford and then was used by Reagan against Carter a few years later… The Misery Index is the sum of a nation’s unemployment, interest rates, and inflation figures…  The misery index now stands at 12.8%, the highest since 1991 and 3 points above its average since then.

Misery Index and the Midterms: "The rules are simple: of the last 15 elections, 13 were 'Change' elections in which the party that held the White House lost seats in Congress. In those "Change" elections, the average Misery Index in October going into Election Day was 10.1 and the average loss was 26 seats in the House; including, some real drubbings of more than 45 seats. The Index is at 10.02 no

The Huffington Post’s Misery Indeximage Remember the Misery Index? It adds together unemployment and inflation to get a quick and dirty measure of, well, misery. But by this measure, since we're in deflation, the current recession doesn't look so bad. So HuffingtonPost came up with its index, which uses the broader measure of unemployment (U6), along with a more narrow basket of prices on essential goods, adding in other things like food stamps and and credit card delinquencies. We think HuffPo's does a much better job of capturing the current misery than the old one.

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