Appellate: courts of appeals / Appellate: supreme courts (states and federal).Civil litigation/class actions: plaintiff.Civil litigation/class actions: defense.Partisan bias is not a factor in my economic analysis.В I look at the evidence and then give it my best shot, serving only the truth. So because they got both the GDP rate and LFP rate wrong, they got the unemployment rate kinda-sorta right.Д«ottom line: Bruce Bartlett and The New York Times are wrong. If you had told Team Obama in August 2009 that GDP growth was going to be as miserably slow as it has been, they almost surely would have forecasted a much higher unemployment rate. HereвЂ™s why: Because of the continued collapse in the LFP rate. So how come we still got that big unemployment drop? GDP growth has been much slower than the WH forecasted, just 1.8% last year with this year not looking much better - if not worse. They also predicted a big drop in the unemployment to 7.5% by the fourth quarter of 2012. They predicted a significant upturn in GDP growth to 3.8% in 2011 and 4.3% in 2012. In August 2009, White House economists made two predictions relevant to this discussion. Know who else got fooled by the LFP drop? The Obama White House. Indeed, it the LFP were 65.4% today, the unemployment rate would be 10.4%.Д¤.

In other words, the decline in the LFP rate greatly exceeds - at least according to the CBO - what can reasonably be attributed to demographics. For 2012, the CBO predicted the LFP would be 65.4% This was a forecast that explicitly took into account such demographic changes. population, Baby Boomers hitting retirement age and all? Well, before the Great Recession, the Congressional Budget Office predicted what the LFP would be in 2012. If the LFP had stayed steady during that period, the unemployment rate today would be 9.1%.Д«ut wait, isnвЂ™t that decline in the LFP unsurprising? DoesnвЂ™t it naturally reflect the aging of the U.S. The LFP rate has declined from 64.5% in November 2010, when unemployment was 9.8%, to 63.6% last month, when unemployment was 7.8%.

But the drop can be explained by another economic variable that many economists also misforecasted: the labor force participation rate. The two-percentage point drop in the unemployment rate over the past two years has surprised many economists because growth during that period has been very weak. What I did not foresee was the freakish rise in jobs as measured by the Labor DepartmentвЂ™s volatile household survey, an increase that many economists think was a one-off or statistical aberration.ДЈ. JPMorgan, for instance, also saw 8% unemployment through next year at least. I was hardly alone in my belief about the unemployment rate. Thus it would be some time, under that scenario, before the U-3 rate moved back below 8%Дў. And if we did have another recession with unemployment above 8% - where it was when I wrote that blog post - the unemployment rate might well move above 9% or even 10%. Slow growth, both studies conclude, sharply raises the recession risk. Like it is doing right now, for instance. economy historically when it grows at a very slow rate for an extended period. It was based on two studies, one from the Federal Reserve and one from Citigroup, looking at what happens to the U.S. On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the unemployment rate in September was 7.8 percent.ДЎ. вЂњIt may be several years before we see unemployment below 8 percent,вЂќ he said in a post on the A.E.I. News columnist James Pethokoukis,now employed by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said that the United States economy was вЂњrunning out of steamвЂќ and that there was now a 50 percent chance of a recession within a year. This is especially evident right now in the case of Republican economists, who appear to have decided that the best way they can help Mitt Romney is by predicting a recession next year.

And he singled me out:Д®conomists belonging to a particular political party often produce forecasts that tend to suit the needs of their party. In a post over at Economix, the economics blog of The New York Times, my friend Bruce Bartlett writes about how political or ideological leanings can affect economic forecasts.

Economix bruce bartlett