FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: It's [Still] The Economy, Dumbass

From the very start of Obama's term, there's been about a 5-6 point gap between approval of his performance on the economy and his performance overall, with the latter figure consistently being somewhat higher. http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/11/its-still-economy-dumbass.html (via shareaholic)

"To channel my Inner Krugman: it's a political imperative for the Democrats of the highest order to get some sort of jobs bill to Obama's desk -- the sooner and the bigger the better. Suppose you could create jobs at a price of about $40,000 per, which is higher than the figure suggested by empirical research on highly targeted jobs programs. A $200 billion bill would then create 5 million new jobs, which would reduce unemployment by about 3.3 percent (e.g. from 10.2 percent to 6.9 percent)."

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