Misery Indices News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Font Size: With gas and food prices surging (along with seemingly every other price), Americans are suddenly talking about the so-called “Misery Index.” Americans who lived through the Jimmy Carter years will likely recall the Misery Index: it’s the sum of America’s inflation and unemployment rates. As the name suggests, higher is bad. But only so much. Consumers and economists alike were shocked by last month’s 4.2 percent inflation rate. It was the fastest year-over-year inflation rate since September 2008. Combined with April’s 6.1 percent unemployment rate, America’s Misery...

Echoes what happened so many years ago, roosevelt was re-elected twice with unemployment moving in on 17%. so a jobless threshold on re-electability may not be the best measure necessarily. logically it should be the difference in unemployed when a president starts and then at re-election later on. that might be logical, but not empirical. three examples for you of higher unemployment at re-election, george w. bush, then richard nixon and dwight d. eisenhower. all were re-elected despite worsening unemployment so tying unemployment to re-electability is tough says the "new york times" nate sil...