concerned about deficits? does this play on the campaign trail? well, i think that they may be concerned about something completely different than that which is jobs. and obviously tax rates and deficits have effect on the jobs picture. but the the president has had the winning hand on taxes for a long time. and it s a weird thing, right? traditionally republicans promising to cut taxes wins the argument. the president said i want to raise taxes and has gone into the teeth of that, raising taxes on the wealthy. romney s plan is obviously vague and ridiculous. we can talk later about the concept of dynamic scoring the magic pixie dust that can make all of the internal mathematical contradictions fly away. in the end a lot of voters, the truth is neither the tax issue specifically, nor the deficit issue specifically, is really what they re focused on. what they re focused on more who
trace: more on the jobs picture. the labor department reports the overall unemployment rate dropped to 7.8 percent in september. but the numbers show that certain demographic groups, some of which tend to vote democratic, are still struggling in today s economy. now live for us in washington, dc. reporter: we are looking at african-americans, hispanics and young people. all he groups that went for president obama in 2008. all three groups have some of the highest unemployment numbers. again, the overall unemployment rate is 7.8 percent. let s look at african-americans, 20 years and older, september unemployment rate is 13.4 percent. for african-american men it is a tick higher, 14.2 percent, for women, 10.9 percent. hispanics, 20 and older, unemployment rate is 9.9 percent. a bit better for hispanic men, 7.6 percent, but worse for hispanic women at 9.8 percent.
live in st. petersburg, florida. governor romney says if he is elected americans will see and i quote, a real recovery. reporter: that is a message that is very important here in this part of florida. president obama won this county where i am and a neighboring county in tampa in 2008. they were split in 2004 between george bush and john kerry. romney took aim at the unemployment figures today saying that while the numbers may look good on the surface, fewer jobs were created in the month of september than in either july or august and he promised that in a romney administration the jobs picture in america would look very different. when i m president of the united states, that unemployment rate is going to come down not because people are giving up and dropping out of the workforce but because we are creating more jobs. i will create jobs and get america working again.
becky, what are the markets going to see in they have known the economy is growing slowly. they have. it looks like we ll open higher today by quite a bit. looks like the dow futures up by 75 points at this moment. we were already looking at positive numbers even before we got the data that came out. part of that is bounceback because s&p is down for five days in a row so people are looking at this as let s slow down for a moment and reassess. we got numbers out at 8:30. it was a mixed picture. jobless claims is the most important. that s what the market is focusing on. that number did come in better than expected. 359,000. consensus estimate was 375,000. it s below 385 we saw last week. people said this is good news. you see a drop in firing. not a surge in hiring but firing is slowing down and we ll take whatever we can get on the jobs picture. when it came to durable goods though, this was a big shocker. durable goods down 13.2%. that was a huge miss because
corporations are flush with cash. nobody s going to go out and build, plan and hire with all that uncertainty and regulations and tax policy and how we re going to address the deficit. but then we have another longer-term problem, and that is the job market is changing. the housing bubble masked that for years because we just inflated the housing market, and that created enormous number of jobs. but once it stopped, everything came apart. the public had borrowed against their houses and had an unreasonable amount of debt. and so now you face what s really true. today it takes two people two breadwinners to be a middle-income family. it used to be one when i grew up. today a lot of the middle-income middle-class jobs have gone overseas or have been automated or require skill sets that people don t have. and that s the challenge. we ve got to do something about it. go ahead, mike. you say the jobs picture is changing. i don t think anyone would disagree with you.