At 5.2% growth economy outpaced predictions

[mister_coffee]

Yet Biden trails in the polls...
...

About that. A lot of those polls make no sense at all. What I mean by that is some of the same polls that found a majority wanted Trump in prison also preferred Trump over Biden in a Presidential match-up. Those two things cannot possibly be true at the same time unless many people have taken leave of their senses.

There are a few things going on here that make these polls less than reliable predictors of the future:

1. The presidential election is 11 months away, and most people aren't really thinking about it yet.
2. Polls conduction through land lines get a skewed sampling of the population and the statistical methods used to detect that skew and correct for it no longer work.
3. Online polls are a poor substitute for random land line phone calls and we have yet to develop the statistical techniques needed to properly interpret the results. Online polls also can be gamed more easily by the subjects being polled (or their passionate followers) and again we don't have techniques to account for that gaming.

To those who have described economics as "the dismal science" I ask, "what about statistics?"

Interestingly, more recent polls show Biden running ahead of Trump. But I doubt those mean anything much either.

[pasayten]

Yet Biden trails in the polls...

Trump tops Biden head-to-head by 4 points in new poll
Only 37 percent approved of Biden’s job performance while 61 percent expressed unfavorable views of the president.
By OLIVIA ALAFRIZ
12/09/2023 10:28 AM EST

President Joe Biden trailed Donald Trump in a Wall Street Journal poll published Saturday, adding to scores of polls forecasting a tough election cycle for the president.

In a hypothetical one-on-one general election matchup, Trump beat out Biden by 4 percentage points among registered voters surveyed across the country by the Journal, 47 percent to 43 percent.


When five third-party and independent candidates were included to the mix, Trump’s lead widened to 6 percentage points, with 37 percent to Biden’s 31 percent. Among these other candidates, which shared a total 17 percent of the vote, independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had nearly half of their combined support, at 8 percent.


The poll also suggested a general dissatisfaction among voters with Biden — only 23 percent of respondents said his policies had helped them personally, while 53 percent said they had been hurt by his policies. Only 37 percent approved of Biden’s job performance while 61 percent expressed unfavorable views of the president.

The president has faced widespread questions about his age — he is 81, the oldest president in U.S. history — and calls to step down after his first term. Biden’s campaign has pushed back against that suggestion, insisting that the president is the best candidate to defeat Trump.

Biden fueled those talks earlier this week, when he told reporters that he was not the only Democrat that could beat Trump, and that if Trump was not running, he might not have run either.

The poll of 1,500 registered voters was conducted from Nov. 29 to Dec. 4 by cellphone, landline and text-to-web. The margin of error was plus-or-minus 2.5 percentage points.

[just-jim]

.
And….

”The jobless rate has now remained below 4% for nearly two years, the longest such streak since the late 1960s.”

https://www.inquirer.com/economy/us-une ... 31208.html
.

[Rideback]

Last quarter's growth is even surpassing the Covid rebuild

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/29/us-gdp- ... cated.html

If Trump had had these kinds of numbers the Rep's would be telling the Dems not to even bother running.

The U.S. economy grew at an even stronger pace then previously indicated in the third quarter, the product of better-than-expected business investment and stronger government spending, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday.

Gross domestic product, a measure of all goods and services produced during the three-month period, accelerated at a 5.2% annualized pace, the department’s second estimate showed. The acceleration topped the initial 4.9% reading and was better than the 5% forecast from economists polled by Dow Jones.

Primarily, the upward revision came from increases in nonresidential fixed investment, which includes structures, equipment and intellectual property. The category showed a rise of 1.3%, which still marked a sharp downward shift from previous quarters.

Government spending also helped boost the Q3 estimate, rising 5.5% for the July-through-September period.

However, consumer spending saw a downward revision, now rising just 3.6%, compared with 4% in the initial estimate.

There was some mixed news on the inflation front. The personal consumption expenditures price index, a gauge the Federal Reserve follows closely, increased 2.8% for the period, a 0.1 percentage point downward revision. However, the chain-weighted price index increased 3.6%, a 0.1 percentage point upward move.

Corporate profits accelerated 4.3% during the period, up sharply from the 0.8% gain in the second quarter.