This morning the Romney campaign releases a new four-minute video showcasing struggling Iowans, declaring, “Millions of Americans are struggling under the Obama economy. Here are a few of their stories. … Hope and change has not been kind to millions of Americans, but they still believe in this great country, and deserve a leader who believes in them: Mitt Romney.”

Between Obama’s steel ad and all of the struggling-economy-themed commercials to come, at least pianists who specialize in slow, melancholy background music can look forward to a prosperous 2012.

Resurgent Republic unveiled a new survey of registered voters. Among the highlights:

• Voters say America is still in a recession by 72 to 24 percent. Agreement crosses partisan lines, with 84 percent of Republicans, 75 percent of independents, and 59 percent of Democrats saying the country is still in a recession.
• 39 percent of voters say they are worse off, 36 percent say they are about the same, and only 25 percent say they are better off than four years ago.
• A majority — 51 percent — says the economy is staying the same, including 56 percent of Republicans and 55 percent of independents, while 19 percent say it is getting worse. Only 30 percent say it is getting better, and that number is driven by Democrats — 48 percent of Democrats say the economy is getting better, but only 25 percent of independents and 15 percent of Republicans agree.
• By 55 to 40 percent, voters say the president’s plan is not working and we need to try something else. Independents agree with Republicans that the plan is not working — 63 to 32 percent and 87 to 10 percent respectively. Only Democrats think the plan is working, by 76 to 19 percent.

This section was rather fascinating, suggesting that Romney is already doing pretty well among independents and that he needs to solidify the Republican vote:

Barack Obama is viewed somewhat more favorably than Mitt Romney overall, primarily because of Obama’s sky-high rating among Democrats. Obama’s favorable/unfavorable rating among all voters is 50/45 percent, including 88/9 percent among Democrats and 14/83 percent among Republicans. Mitt Romney’s rating is 41/45 percent overall, including 72/18 percent among Republicans and 13/71 percent among Democrats.

Independents view Barack Obama more negatively than Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney’s favorable/unfavorable rating among Independents is 43/42 percent, compared to 44/50 percent for Barack Obama. Based on their current perceptions, Obama faces more of an uphill climb than Romney among Independent voters.

Independents hold an equally negative view of Republicans and Democrats in Congress. Predictably Republican and Democratic voters give high marks to representatives of their own party in Congress — the favorable/unfavorable ratings are 69/23 percent for Republican voters’ perception of Republicans in Congress and 76/19 percent for Democratic voters’ perception of Democrats in Congress. It will come as no surprise that Independent voters dislike both — their ratings are 32/56 percent for Republicans in Congress and 30/58 percent for Democrats in Congress.

Independents favor Republicans over Democrats on the generic ballot for Congress. Independents say they prefer the Republican candidate over the Democratic candidate for Congress by 38 to 32 percent.

Barack Obama leads Mitt Romney by single digits on the ballot test, driven by greater Democratic than Republican consolidation around the respective nominees at this point. Obama leads Romney overall by 49 to 42 percent, but Independents favor Romney by 45 to 41 percent. Obama’s lead comes from the five points more Democrats than Republicans in the sample, coupled with Obama taking 90 percent of the Democratic vote and Romney taking 84 percent of the Republican vote. Based on 2008 exit polls where 89 percent of Democrats backed Obama and 90 percent of Republicans backed John McCain, that partisan differential in support for their respective nominees is likely to evaporate by Election Day.

Six months from Election Day, Republicans indicate more interest in the election than Democrats or Independents. Seventy-eight percent of Republicans say they are “absolutely certain” to vote in the fall election, compared to 72 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of Independents.

This is a survey of 1,000 registered voters, conducted April 30 to May 3, and the sample is 35 percent Democrat, 31 percent independent, and 30 percent Republican. They note, “the margins of error for responses with an even split — 50 percent for one response and 50 percent for another response — are ±3.10 percent for the full sample, ±5.69 percent for Republicans (297 respondents), ±5.55 percent for Independents (312 respondents), and ±5.28 percent for Democrats (345 respondents).”

Breaking from Quinnipiac this morning:

Riding the voter perception that he is as good as or better than President Barack Obama at fixing the economy, Republican challenger Mitt Romney catches up with the president in Florida and Ohio, two critical swing states, while the president opens an 8-point lead in Pennsylvania, according to a Quinnipiac University Swing State Poll released today.

•  Florida:  Romney with 44 percent to Obama’s 43 percent, too close to call;

•   ; Ohio:  Obama with 44 percent to Romney’s 42 percent, too close to call;

•    Pennsylvania:  Obama tops Romney 47 – 39 percent.

Also note these two questions:

15. The Supreme Court has heard a challenge to the health care law. Do you want the Supreme Court to uphold the health care law or overturn it?

                      FL     OH     PA

Uphold it        38%    37%    43%

Overturn it      51     51     46

DK/NA             11     12     11

11. Do you think the United States economy is in a recession now?

                FL     OH     PA

Yes         70%    67%    69%

No          26     31     28

DK/NA    4          3      4

The Tuesday edition of the Morning Jolt features signs you may be a Rom-neck, the worst month for the national deficit ever, and then this curious development in the economic numbers:

GDP, Unemployment Rate… You Two Used to Be So Close. How Did You Grow Apart?

In the Wall Street Journal, Jon Hilsenrath asks:

Many economists in the past few weeks have again reduced their estimates of growth. The economy by many estimates is on track to grow at an annual rate of less than 2% in the first three months of 2012. The economy expanded just 1.7% last year. And since the final months of 2009, when unemployment peaked, the economy has expanded at a pretty paltry 2.5% annual rate.

How can an economy that is growing so slowly produce such big declines in unemployment?

And now, Morning Jolt readers, I will surprise you by quoting some liberal bloggers. No, really, stay with me, because I think they articulate what you’re going to hear a lot of in 2012: a sense that the economy as we experience it does not match up to what the official numbers say.

Ezra Klein:

Something odd is happening in the economy. Jobs are coming back, and relatively quickly. But growth is lagging. Or, at the least, we think it is. Virtually every estimate of GDP growth for the first quarter of 2012 is below two percent — that’s a third lower than it was in the fourth quarter of 2011, when payroll growth was lower — and many of those estimates are being revised downward as new data streams in.

A couple of things could be going on here. One possibility is that the preliminary GDP data is wrong. That happens. In the fourth quarter of 2008, the early GDP data said the economy shrunk by 3.8 percent. Later on, we learned the real number was closer to nine percent. A smaller, more positive discrepancy might explain this riddle, too… Then there’s the possibility that the previous three months of job growth turn out to be a tease, and the recovery will falter in the middle of the year. Call that the “2011 scenario”: Back in February, March and April of 2011, payrolls rose by an average of 239,000 jobs a month. In May, June and July, that fell to an average of 78,000 a month. So far, this economy has not been kind to those who try and extrapolate a self-sustaining recovery from a few months of strong job growth.

David Dayen, writing at FireDogLake:

It could be that GDP data is just wrong, and will get reassessed upwards. That’s the optimistic scenario. Or it could be due to slower productivity growth, meaning that businesses must hire more workers to perform the same amount of tasks. Christina Romer believes that businesses “overfired” during the low points of the economy, and are now compensating by hiring to satisfy current demand (this may partly explain her prediction back in 2009 that unemployment would top out around 8%, also based on Okun’s Law and GDP projections at the time). Jared Bernstein says that trend growth is actually around 1-2% now, not 2.5%, and so Okun’s Law is actually working.

These opinions may explain the discrepancy, but they also portend bad signs for the economy going forward. Because with either explanation, it would mean that job growth will soon stall out, either as businesses finish rebalancing to meet demand, or as the labor force returns to normal growth. 

A lot of people will read this and go, ‘ah-ha, this means the Obama administration is cooking the books on the unemployment figures!’ I’m not sure it’s quite so simple; I think they were always an imprecise measurement – they’re essentially monthly little mini-census surveys of employers and random workers – that have grown less precise as the economy changed. How many Americans are getting paid cash under the table? How do you count freelancers in a slow period?

David Stockman wrote recently, “I don’t particularly believe in tin foil hats, but all of these mainstream economists treat the BLS and BEA data like it’s holy writ—when it’s evident that the reports are so massaged, estimated, deemed, revised, re-bench marked and seasonally adjusted that any month-to-month change has a decent chance of being noise. What deep secret might they be hiding? … the mainstream narrative never gets to the trend. In this case,  the plain fact is that we are warehousing a larger and larger population of adults who are one way or another living off transfer payments, relatives, sub-prime credit, and the black market. 

For amusement, Stockman found a fascinating example of the numbers seeming… a little too stable, year by year:

Since 2000, the January job loss against a December payroll of between 130 and 135 million has varied within a tiny range of about 150,000. Other than January 2009 when the economy was being smacked by the post-Lehman melt-down in the financial markets, this means that the unadjusted January payroll count declined within a super-tight range of 2.00% to 2.20% of the December payroll.

Really? Granted the U.S. economy is a regular fellow, but how could there be such astounding uniformity every January, year after year in the raw numbers, as in the following sequence for January 2001 thru January 2012, respectively: 2.16%, 2.19%, 2.05%, 2.03%, 2,03%, 1.96%, 2.03% 2.19%, 2.73% (2009 outlier), 2.20%, 2.18% and 2.02%.

After all, you have weather aberrations, huge fluctuations in year to year economic conditions, the weak, random nature of the establishment survey, the constant fiddling with the birth-death adjustment which is carried in the raw numbers, the Christmas shopping season variation from red hot-to-punk across the years, the timing of the survey week and much more. And the dice always lands on almost exactly a 2.03% change from December. Right.

This is meant to be a long-winded encouragement to you to apply your patented numbers forensic skills to the monthly BLS reports or any of the other market movers. In the last 7 years, for example, the Christmas shopping season has been all over the lot and presumably, retail hiring, too. But the unadjusted retail jobs reduction in January vs. December has not varied by much more than 150,000 from a base count of 15 million.  That’s a 1% variation, notwithstanding the huge shopping season differences they report on bubble vision.

Pretty weird, huh?

Quinnipiac lets us know that their respondents have split personalities on the economy:

American voters say 54 – 43 percent that the economy has begun to recover, a 51-point shift in opinion since September 1, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today.

This is a reversal from a September 1 survey in which voters said 68 – 28 percent the economy was not in recovery.

Voters say 66 – 30 percent that the economy is in a recession, down from 77 – 20 percent in an October 16 survey by the independent Quinnipiac University.

But the improved voter confidence does not help President Barack Obama who gets a negative 45 – 49 percent job approval rating, compared to negative 44 – 50 percent rating November 23. Voters say 50 – 45 percent that President Obama does not deserve reelection, compared to 48 – 45 percent saying no in November.

So, 54 percent think we’re in recovery, but 66 percent think we’re in recession. In most people’s minds, those two would appear contradictory, but perhaps 20 percent think we’re recovering to a less bad recessionary state.

Further down in the numbers, we see 4 percent consider themselves “very satisfied” with the state of the country, 26 percent “satisfied,” 28 percent “dissatisfied,” and 42 percent “very dissatisfied.”

Gallup:

U.S. small-business owners who aren’t hiring — 85% of those surveyed — are most likely to say the reasons they are not doing so include not needing additional employees; worries about weak business conditions, including revenues; cash flow; and the overall U.S. economy. Additionally, nearly half of small-business owners point to potential healthcare costs (48%) and government regulations (46%) as reasons. One in four are not hiring because they worry they may not be in business in 12 months.

The next time some Democrat talks about “the recovery,” note that 66 percent of the small businesses who aren’t hiring say it’s because of worries about the national economy.

Three years ago, Obama declared:

I will be held accountable. I’ve got four years. A year from now, people are going to see that we’re starting to make some progress, but there’s still going to be some pain out there. If I don’t have this done in three years, then this is going to be a one-term proposition.

Three years from that statement would be February 2012. Obama has seven months to demonstrate a significant improvement in the economy he inherited.

I wonder if Rep. Jim Moran (D., Va.) regrets saying in June 2010, “The economy has recovered.”

I wonder if Tim Geithner regrets writing an op-ed entitled “Welcome to the Recovery” in the New York Times on August 2, 2010.

I wonder if Ron Sims, deputy secretary of housing and urban development, regrets writing on the White House blog that “this summer is sure to be a Summer of Economic Recovery” in June 2010.

Finally, I wonder if Debbie Wasserman Schultz regrets saying in June, “I’m going to take ownership right now because we began to turn the economy around.”

Gas prices are up for the fourth straight week.

The Wall Street Journal:

More than 13 million individuals are out of work—and millions more are stuck in part-time jobs—as the unemployment rate remains high at 8.5 percent. In 2011, wages didn’t keep up with inflation, prompting many consumers to dip into savings and, more recently, to step up borrowing. The housing market, which has weighed on the economic recovery, has much ground to regain. A Commerce Department report Thursday showed that home construction fell 4.1 percent in December, capping what one forecaster called one of the “worst years on record” for the home-building industry.

But cheer up, America. After visiting Disneyworld, Obama sang last night!

As Glenn Reynolds used to say, “we’re in the very best of hands.”

Another terrific example of how an exceptionally modest bit of improvement in economic data is used to justify a preferred media narrative, from Reuters:

There have also been signs that the U.S. economic recovery, expected to be the most important issue in the 2012 election, is on track. On Wednesday, data showed U.S. private employers added more jobs than expected last month, and Friday’s monthly unemployment report showed that the U.S. jobless rate ticked downward to 9 percent from September’s 9.1 percent rate.

That’s in a piece, entitled “Republican sexual harassment furor boosts Obama,” that offers a somewhat plausible theory without citing much direct data to support that idea.

It mentions the Quinnipiac poll from this week, the one that used a much more heavily Democratic sample:

The sample of voters to whom Quinnipiac talked in the new poll is significantly more Democratic — and less Republican — than the early October survey. In the current poll, 35 percent of respondents identified as Democrats, 22 percent as Republicans and 36 percent as independents, according to data provided to National JournalWednesday morning. In the early October poll, 31 percent of respondents were Democrats, 28 percent were Republicans and 33 percent were independents.

(For reference: In 2008, according to exit polls, 39 percent of voters identified as Democrats, 32 percent identified as Republicans and 29 percent identified as independents. In the 2010 midterm elections; the percentages of Democrats and Republicans were equal; midterm elections typically feature higher Republican turnout.)

By the way, that poll was conducted before the Politico story about Cain broke.

Otherwise, the story quotes David Yepsen, director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University, Republican strategist Ford O’Connell, Democratic strategist Greg Haas, and Christopher Arterton, a professor at George Washington University who has been a Democratic consultant.

Now, it is true that time spent discussing what Cain did or did not do with several former employees is time not spent making an argument against Obama. But if Cain doesn’t get the nomination, this is largely moot — I remain unconvinced that some Cain-backing conservatives will stay home on Election Day 2012 to protest how some GOP rival treated this issue — and if he does, it suggests that this story, with all of its remaining known unknowns and unknown unknowns, will be a larger factor in voters’ minds than, say, Obama’s performance since taking office.

Today’s Morning Jolt looks at a New Hampshire primary and a late addition to the list of little-known Rick Perry Facts, but focuses mostly on what’s driving the “We Are the 99 Percent” folks — who may not completely overlap with the Occupy Wall Street protesters.

So I went through the photos of the “We Are the 99 Percent” crowd, in which they take pictures of themselves looking forlorn and hold up notebooks describing the life circumstances that make them so angry. Sometimes you get some laughable cases, like the guy who wants a bailout for his art school student loans. But as you go through them, there are some genuinely heartbreaking tales of woe. A point that hasn’t come through in much of the protests in the park in New York City is how often people say, “I consider myself lucky, I still have a place to live and my loved ones” or some other expression of gratitude.

In a lot of cases, they describe working part time, often more than one part time job, and struggling to get by. These are actually the faces to the monthly figure we get from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Last month, BLS calculated that 9.3 million Americans were working part time because they couldn’t find the full-time work they desired; in September, an additional 444,000 Americans entered this category. Part-time work is better than no work, but it often doesn’t include benefits and one inevitably gets the stress and challenge of two separate work schedules, added with whatever other responsibilities one has (family, etc.).

The world has always had young people who majored in studies that don’t easily lend themselves to entry-level jobs. What it also often had was enough entry-level jobs for them to make a living doing something else that pays the bills while they figure out how to turn that sociology or classical studies or drama or whatever degree into an actual career. Since 2008, the American economy has had fewer and fewer options, and more and more folks looking for those jobs. And while we’ve certainly had recessions before, we haven’t had multiple years of unemployment at 9 percent or so, at least not since the Great Depression.

I think two big factors are driving this — the first is the realization that electing Obama, the Munificent Sun-God, didn’t actually do much to fix many of the problems young people were upset about in 2008. The job market still stinks, wage growth is a distant memory, the drop in housing prices hurts current homeowners and not enough young earners have the resources to take advantage of lower home prices and oh, by the way, gas is $4 per gallon instead of $3 per gallon.

The second big factor is TARP; the common cry from a lot of these folks is a whiny, “where’s my bailout?” The other night, HBO replayed Too Big to Fail, their star-studded depiction of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s actions during the 2008 financial meltdown. It was good for what it was, watching Hollywood stars reenact semi-public figures in annotated versions of their meetings during events of not too long ago. (Paul Giamatti made a strangely plausible Ben Bernanke; Billy Crudup plays as a suspiciously noble and well-reasoning, if fidgety, Tim Geithner. I kept yelling, “He’s the mole! He’s the mole! Somebody stop him!” but then I remembered I was thinking of Mission Impossible 3. Or was I?) Whether you think TARP was necessary or not — the movie clearly makes TARP opponents in the House GOP out to be reckless villains, but the closing text portrays the program as failing most of its fundamental goals — I think TARP and the Three Four Years’ Recession have taken a one-two punch to the average Americans’ sense of how the world works. To see the Feds giving hundreds of billions of dollars to immensely powerful banks with few strings attached is baffling and incongruous; to see such a fortune spent to save banks from the consequences of their bad decisions, while so many ordinary Americans suffer worse — i.e., mass layoffs that have little to do with the work quality of those laid off — persuades a lot of folks that the whole system is rigged and that the American Dream is a con. I don’t think that’s true, but as we inch into our fourth year of hard times, I can’t begrudge someone who’s burned through their savings from feeling that hard work and making the right decisions doesn’t really pay off in modern America anymore. Few economists expect much of an improvement in the year to come; I wonder how many Americans will feel even angrier, and even more eager to lash out at a scapegoat, a year from now.

Obama adviser David Plouffe, speaking on Good Morning America today, offered a strangely contradictory message: that Congress has to pass Obama’s jobs bill to improve the economy, and that the Obama campaign is preparing for a tough race because the economy won’t improve anytime soon.

Stephanopolous: Last week Vice President Biden said that the Republican Party is actually strong enough to win. Is he right?

Plouffe: We’re going to have a close election. Some things aren’t going to change between now and next November. We’re obviously in a tough economy. We’re going to have a very close election as most presidential elections are. So we’re going to have to fight for every vote, and that’s what we intend to do. What the president’s focused on is how do we get people back to work in the short term and how do we rebuild an economy in the long term that makes sure hard work and responsibility is rewarded and that the middle class feels more secure?

By the way, if the Obama team is wondering why no one seems all that enthused about their latest big-spending bill designed to lower the unemployment rate, this chart from the Washington Post from a few days ago seems pretty illustrative:

According to the White House’s projections, the stimulus bill was supposed to bring down the unemployment rate to about 6.5 percent or so by now.

Obama and his team have given skeptics absolutely no reason to believe that this grab-bag of Democratic spending proposals will impact the unemployment rate any differently than the last one — except that this one is smaller.

Another bad week on Wall Street:

After dropping 527 points, the Dow Jones industrial average closed down 391 points, the second consecutive rout in the stock market since the Federal Reserve announced a change in strategy for fighting the economic slowdown. One financial indicator after another showed that investors are quickly losing hope that the economy can keep growing.

It appears the Dow is set for its worst week since the 2008 meltdown.

When you look around at the state of the country, it’s kind of remarkable that President Obama is considered anything other than toast in the 2012 election.

• There was a time in America when 500-point drops in a day were considered shocking. The sixth, ninth, and eleventh-largest single-day point drops in Dow history occurred in August. Had the markets not recovered in the final hour, today would have ranked ninth. The casual investor may not check his 401(k)s regularly, but when he does, he gets hit with bad news that he hoped he had left behind in 2008.
• The spike in gas prices has subsided only marginally; the national average is $3.56 per gallon. The spike has lasted longer than the spike in the summer of 2008, which, it may be argued, was the first real ominous indicator of the economic troubles to come. Of course, the 2008 spike occurred when the economy was not in recession.
• The unemployment rate climbed above 9 percent in May 2009 and is projected to more or less stay there through 2012.
• The housing market is, in most places, still waiting for any signs of recovery: “In the housing market inhabited by most Americans, prices have fallen 30 percent or more since the peak in 2007. That’s a steeper decline than during the Depression. Some people have had their homes on the market for a year without a single offer. Almost a quarter of American homeowners owe more on their house than it’s worth. Another quarter have less than 20 percent equity.”

Yet the Obama team still feels confident that they’ll win once their message and agenda is contrasted with that of their Republican rival. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s precisely what they were saying about the 2010 midterms, as late as August of that year:

US President Barack Obama is “confident” his Democratic Party will keep control of both houses of Congress in November’s mid-term elections, the White House said Tuesday.

“The president thinks that this election is a choice between the policies that move our country forward or the policies that got us to the crisis that we’re in right now,” White House deputy spokesman Bill Burton said.

“But he?s confident that given that choice in the voting booths in November that Democrats will be successful and he does think that we will hold on to both the House and the Senate,” he told reporters on the presidential jet.

Obama was on a busy campaign swing ahead of the start of his summer vacation on Thursday. He was headed to Washington state, Wisconsin and California before dropping in on Ohio on Tuesday and Florida on Wednesday.

You’ll recall that Obama’s candidates lost in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida.

Tonight, a slew of Republicans will take the stage, and all of them will tear apart the easy target of the economy’s performance under Obama. But the harder task will be persuading those watching at home that he (or she) is the one uniquely qualified to lead a country enduring an economic crisis.

A couple of folks are buzzing about this Zero Hedge post declaring that the double-dip recession has already begun, citing the year-over-year change in real GDP. The figure dropped to 1.5 percent; they note “since 1948, every time the four-quarter change has fallen below 2 percent, the economy has entered a recession.”

I’d note another interesting bit of analysis, perhaps a bit more useful for those of us watching the political world: The Conference Board’s assessment of consumer confidence has never fallen as far as it has, as quickly as it has, from February 2011 to August 2011.

February:

The Consumer Confidence Index rose to a three-year high this month as consumers felt more positive about their income prospects and the direction the economy was headed. The Conference Board said Tuesday its Consumer Confidence Index climbed to 70.4 this month, up from a revised 64.8 in January, hitting its highest level since February 2008. It was the index’s fifth consecutive monthly increase and topped expectations of a reading of 65.0 among economists, according to FactSet.

August:

The Conference Board’s index slumped to 44.5, the weakest since April 2009, from a revised 59.2 reading in July, figures from the New York-based research group showed today. It was the biggest point drop since October 2008.

Note that what this measures isn’t really current economic conditions but how consumers think they’ll be doing in the near future.

It has been lower, but it has never fallen as far as quickly as it has in the past six months. As “Tyler Durden” puts it at Zero Hedge, this data supports the shocking argument that, economically, at least, “2011 has been the most disappointing year for Americans in history.”  Not worst, but most disappointing. Of course, the political impact on an incumbent president may be indistinguishable.

Over on the home page, I take a look at the most common adverb of the Obama years: “unexpectedly.”

I hope my analysis of coverage of economic news in recent years isn’t . . . well, predictable.

There’s plenty about the debt-ceiling talks in the Morning Jolt, as well as a surprising development in the race to replace Anthony Weiner in Congress. But there’s also some easily overlooked economic news:

Alas, Cisco Did Not Kid About This. He Was No Friend Of Mine.

Recovery Summ- oh, fudge.  “Cisco Systems Inc., the largest networking-equipment company, may cut as many as 10,000 jobs, or about 14 percent of its workforce, to revive profit growth, according to two people familiar with the plans. The cuts include as many as 7,000 jobs that would be eliminated by the end of August, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t final. Cisco is also providing early-retirement packages to about 3,000 workers who accepted buyouts, the people said.”

Tech analyst “The Snitch” observes, “The numbers will be large enough — reportedly, 7,000 jobs will be cut in August — to noticeably affect the Labor Department’s monthly employment reports This is obviously not good news for an economy beset by a seemingly intractable unemployment problem. On the other hand, it’s not really representative of the economy’s overall problems. Cisco has done this to itself. Most other big tech firms, including Cisco’s direct competitors like Hewlett-Packard and Juniper Networks, are doing pretty well. Same deal with other companies, like Microsoft, Google, and Apple, as well as social-media companies both public and private, like Facebook and LinkedIn.”

Anecdotally, a couple readers said that Friday’s job news seemed to hit harder than the two previous months. If it’s four in a row, what then? Will that be enough to knock the 30some percent who still reflectively say Obama is doing a good job handling the economy?

I’ll bet every president wished they received as much benefit of the doubt as you see in this CNN headline:

American Sauce: Maybe the economy’s not so bad?

Yes, unemployment is again on the rise and the June jobs report had all the strength of an ICU patient. Yes, economic stress is literally making people sick. But are things as grim as they feel?

Maybe not.

Among the criteria of good signs:

State and local taxes are going up, indicating income and spending are up. Overall, the Census Bureau says states and local government saw tax revenue jump 4.7 percent in the first three months of this year.

Even more of an exclamation point: Individual income tax revenue sprung up 11.9 percent over the year before.

And no, this is not attributed to states increasing tax rates. Texas and South Carolina, just to name two no-new-taxes states, saw tax revenue go up around 7 percent.

Of course tax revenues should be higher in many states and localities; in many places, taxes are higher. As I wrote earlier this year:

The first year of Obama’s presidency, 29 states enacted tax and fee increases worth roughly $24 billion, the largest single-year increase ever. Of course, these taxes went into effect as unemployment skyrocketed and incomes remained flat. Then, in 2010, as the economy continued to struggle, states enacted another $6.2 billion in tax increases and an additional $2.9 billion in separate “revenue measures”, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers. While it’s only a fraction of the 2009 hikes, it remains the fourth-largest in the past 19 years.

Nine states increased sales taxes; eight states increased income taxes, seven states increased corporate income taxes, seven states increased tobacco taxes, five states increased gas taxes, and ten states increased other taxes. It’s enough to drive you to drink; by some miracle, no state increased taxes on alcohol in 2010. (New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Vermont increased them in 2009.)

As for surprise that tax revenue is up in low-tax, low-regulation states like Texas, as Rich wrote last year:

More than half of the net new jobs in the U.S. during the past 12 months were created in the Lone Star State.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 214,000 net new jobs were created in the United States from August 2009 to August 2010. Texas created 119,000 jobs during the same period. If every state in the country had performed as well, we’d have created about 1.5 million jobs nationally during the past year, and maybe “stimulus” wouldn’t be such a dirty word.

Later in the CNN piece, we read: “Still, after GDP plunged at the end of 2008 and into the start of 2009, the economy seems to have stabilized and is not tanking. Unfortunately, it is stable and stagnant. See this as a question of perspective; the glass may now be at least a quarter full.”

It takes a unique perspective to characterize “stable and stagnant” as “not so bad.”

Some really interesting numbers from Quinnipiac this morning:

American voters say 54 – 43 percent that the economy is beginning to recover and more voters give President Barack Obama credit for the upturn, but by 48 – 43 percent they want Congress to repeal his health care overhaul, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released today.

The country is in recession, 73 percent of voters say, although that number is down from 79 percent in a July 22 survey by the independent Quinnipiac University.  Voters think 46 – 28 percent that President Obama’s policies will help rather than hurt the economy.

But voters say 32 – 29 percent that Obama’s policies will hurt rather than help their personal financial situation, while 36 percent say these policies won’t make a difference.

Interesting split there. I wonder how many voters think he’s taking money out of their pockets, but that the overall effect will be beneficial.

The recession number, three years after its official start, is terrible, of course.

American voters say 51 – 41 percent that the U.S. should not be involved in Afghanistan, the lowest level of support for this war since Obama became president.

The key to the public support for repealing the new health care law is among independent voters who want it taken off the books 54 – 37 percent.  Republicans agree 83 – 12 percent, while Democrats support the health care reform 76 – 16 percent.  Men want it repealed 53 – 40 percent, while women are split with 46 percent in favor of health care reform and 44 percent for repeal.  White voters support repeal 56 – 37 percent, while black voters say let the law stand 75 – 15 percent and Hispanics want to keep the law 51 – 28 percent.

“The Republicans pushing repeal of the health care law have more American people on their side.  They may not have the votes in the Senate, but they have many on Main Street,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “While President Obama’s poll rating has improved in recent weeks, the coalition against his health care plan remains and is quite similar to the one that existed when his numbers were at their nadir.”