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Nate Silver's Numbers Indicate Probable Obama Win, World Agrees
An anonymous reader writes "The state-by-state election outcome probabilities today on Nate Silver's 538 imply a 97.7% probability for Obama to win 270 or more electoral college votes this coming Tuesday. A site that allows anyone but U.S. citizens vote seems to indicate that the rest of the world hopes these numbers are accurate. "
The 538 website publishes the marginal probabilities of each state's outcome. The random anonymous script that is linked in this story just takes the product of these to compute the joint probability of Obama winning a particular set of states. This is of course a mistake. The probability that Obama wins Pennsylvania and Ohio is not the product of the probability that he wins each state separately, unless those two events are statistically independent. Of course, in reality and in the 538 model, they are not -- if Obama loses Pennsylvania he is also more likely to lose Ohio. I think this mainly accounts for the difference between the 538 prediction and the "prediction" of the random anonymous crap that the story links.
His plans, according to his own site, are to peg military spending to 4% of GDP (a $200B/yr increase), and slash taxes in a number of ways that add up to $500B/yr. He promises that he will pay for this $700B/yr deficit by closing loopholes, but steadfastly refuses to say which loopholes. He has offered one idea: capping deductions, which isn't a bad plan, but it won't come close to making up that $700B/yr gap.
That's what people are talking about when they complain he won't share the details of the plan. He's happy to give out the good details: cut taxes here, spend money there. But he refuses to talk about how any of that will be paid for. That's worrisome.
Google for "Obama's list of achievements" and you'll be surprised.
I know I was.
I'm starting to think that Obama is ropa doping and not really crowing about accomplisments while actually getting a lot done despite opposition from the party of "no".
Even this late in the game I was suprised to here that he put back in "paygo" in 2010.
I felt like obama was ineffective and spineless but apparently he's just wily instead of "testosterone he man" like bush/cheney were.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
We survived eight years of George W. Bush, you will survive eight years of Barack Obama.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
We have not had a left candidate that I can remember in my life. Surely not in the last decade.
We have right and hard right. You can call that centrist if you like, but I will not.
Nate's aggregate numbers allow for the possibility of systemic bias in the national and state by state polls, based on their historical distribution around the real election results.
US voters get exactly the government they deserve.
Jobs?
According to the WSJ (not a left leaning publication), after fixing Bush's failings, jobs under Obama have been going up WHILE he's been reducing gov't head count.
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2012/11/02/tallying-president-obamas-jobs-record/
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Keynesianism makes sense. There are times when you need to short circuit the economy to get it moving again. The government needs to put money into people's hands, and rather than just handing it out, why not spend on some infrastructure projects to achieve the upgrading of critical national infrastructure and to get money in people's hands so they can spend.
Of course, there are limits to how much of it you must do before it becomes damaging, but you could say the same about anything really. They key is to make sure that you bank some in the good years (paying down the debt) so that in the bad times, you have good headroom to be able to stimulate the economy.
Guess what the Republicans did during the boom years? The Republican party is not the party of the responsible! They are the party of the tough talkers though!