It's tough. I've dug into a bunch of stats and keep getting the same answer over and over. Democrat-led eras are just better, almost without regard to how you slice the data.
Is there any measurable way the country does better with Republican presidents?
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It's tough. I've dug into a bunch of stats and keep getting the same answer over and over. Democrat-led eras are just better, almost without regard to how you slice the data.
Clinton was productive right out of the gate. In fact, nearly all his big accomplishments date to his first term. That's when we got the Family Medical Leave Act, the passage of the Brady Bill, trade liberalization, a big minimum wage hike, the Dayton Agreement, the legislative package that put 100,000 more cops on the street, and so on.
That's why his approval ratings were down at the time: when Democrats are accomplishing things, conservative hate them for changing too much, and progressives hate them for giving up on various liberal agenda items in order to get legislation passed. It's usually only at a later stage, when Republicans have enough power to bog things down and make sure nothing serious gets passed, that Democratic presidencies have their popularity rebound. At that stage, the progressives start judging them relative to the opposition, rather than relative to their pie-in-the-sky dreams of a perfect liberal avenger.
Exactly on causation. Yes, the data is interesting. Problems vary because, besides the President there's Congress....who hold the purse strings. Presidents can't sign bills or budgets that don't exist. It's up to Congress to work out solutions. The President isn't the Captain of the ship. He's the chairman of two boards; one with 100 members and the other with 435 members.
It's the result of all those factors which determines the mood of the nation. To a large extent, I think the main factor is stability. If Americans are confident about the stability of the nation, the economy grows. If they are worried about the stability of the nation, they save their money and the economy suffers. Hence Bush the Lesser's plea for Americans to go to the Mall.
I don't have a huge problem with Eisenhower, but I think the "soft focus" of history makes people forget a few things. For starters, did you know he led the nation into three separate recessions? Seriously -- no modern president had more recessions than him. And it shows in some of the economic stats. The month he took office, the unemployment rate was 2.9%. By the time he left, it was 6.6%. He also failed badly to provide leadership in pushing back against McCarthyism. McCarthy scared Eisenhower, so he mostly let him run wild without calling him out. When a Republican finally had the balls to speak up, it wasn't anyone in the administration, but rather Margaret Chase Smith, a senator from Maine. Eisenhower also did pathetically little on the civil rights front, relative to his predecessor (who integrated the armed forces) or his successors. And, again, you can see the result. When Ike left office, well over half of all Black people lived in poverty.
As for Reagan's military overspend, I'd actually have counted that against him. He basically sold the nation a bill of goods based on the idea that the Soviet Union was a huge threat, even as they were actively imploding and desperately suing for peace. The result was a massive run-up in deficits with precious little to show for it. And so much of that money turned out to be wasted -- on things like Star Wars defense shields that didn't work at all, or Cold-War-minded weapons systems that would quickly be obsolete.
You'll note this cherry-picking approach to history is absolutely central to Republicans apologetics. The unemployment rate rose 1.7 points on Trump's watch, which is horrible, so the Republicans will instead cherry pick an exact moment in time on his watch and implicitly argue that moment is all that matters, not the train wreck that followed. It would be like if Democrats argued Reagan should be judged only by his 10.8% unemployment rate peak, without regard to the fact that overall unemployment rates declined on his watch.
Anyway, can you think of any metric where Republicans, collectively, have outperformed Democrats?
I discussed inflation in the top post. If you look at Democrats vs. Republicans as a whole, rather than cherry-picking particular periods, then inflation has actually been lower, on average, during Democratic presidencies. That said, unlike with every other indicator I've looked into, there is a reasonable way to crunch those numbers that makes the Republicans look a bit better when it comes to inflation (if you measure net change in the rate from start to finish of each presidency).
If I am not mistaken, Republican administrations lead in crimes committed by administration figures while in office.
They blow the Democrats out of the water on that.
Would that count?
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The U.S. Just Became a Net Oil Exporter for the First Time in 75 Years
America turned into a net oil exporter last week, breaking almost 75 years of continued dependence on foreign oil and marking a pivotal — even if likely brief — moment toward what U.S. President Donald Trump has branded as “energy independence.”
The shift to net exports is the dramatic result of an unprecedented boom in American oil production, with thousands of wells pumping from the Permian region of Texas and New Mexico to the Bakken in North Dakota to the Marcellus in Pennsylvania.
https://transtextreating.com/news/u-s-just-became-net-oil-exporter-first-time-75-years/
America turned into a net oil exporter last week, breaking almost 75 years of continued dependence on foreign oil and marking a pivotal — even if likely brief — moment toward what U.S. President Donald Trump has branded as “energy independence.”
The shift to net exports is the dramatic result of an unprecedented boom in American oil production, with thousands of wells pumping from the Permian region of Texas and New Mexico to the Bakken in North Dakota to the Marcellus in Pennsylvania.
https://transtextreating.com/news/u-s-just-became-net-oil-exporter-first-time-75-years/
You include COVID as it's just a normal part of the POTUS 4 years.
Fauci locked down the country -using that 4h year in any metric is ludicrous
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Republicans have a better record of NOT calling everyone who disagrees with them domestic terrorists.
see parental persecution.
see republican persecution.
see parental persecution.
see republican persecution.
I think Biden will handle inflation well. That remains to be seen, though.
One thing I find interesting is how right-wing thinking on inflation changed dramatically just recently. In the past, it was generally understood among economists that it takes a while for excess money supply to impact pricing in an economy, such that, for example, the high inflation of the Ford and Nixon years was in part because the Fed had been too loose with money supply in the Johnson era. But now, they act like it's an instant thing, where the loose money supply of the late Trump era has nothing to do with prices rising today.
One reason I find that so weird is because Fed policy was so bizarre in 2019. The Fed cut rates in July 2019, September 2019, and October 2019, despite unemployment rates being so low and inflation rates being above the Fed's target. Why? Why take an overheated economy and pour fuel on it? I get why Trump and the conservatives wanted that, since they thought he'd get reelected if the economy was supercharged in 2020. But why did the Fed risk bringing about high inflation just to heat up an already-hot economy?
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That's because the lying cocksuckers call them "Marxists" and "Globalists".
I only call globalists globalists. ( central banker tenet of the communism.)
I use marxist in reference to their cultural war on goodness and decency. (anti family pro degeneracy tenet of the communism.)
QED. Thanks!
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the republicans woke the fuck up first, banker babe.
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globalist is accurate for a globalist.
terrorist is not accurate for a constitutionalist or a concerned parent.
your problem is you're a retarded dumfuck.
The GDP rose between GW Bush and Obama. Specifically, the real GDP when Trump left was $15,367 billion, and when Obama left it was $17,813. What you appear to be referencing is the rate of increase under each. It's true that the Bush years, with the Fed stimulating it with a net decline in rates, and with Congress stimulating it further with massive deficit increases, had slightly higher growth rates than the Obama years, with the Fed burdening the economy with a net increase in rates, and Congress further burdening it by cutting deficits by over half. But over time, the Dem eras as a whole had much stronger GDP growth.
I'm happy to look at any measurable indicator you name. However, you bring up inflation and that was already specifically calculated, in two different ways, in the top post.
Taxes, I suppose, it a quantifiable comparison we could make. However, I don't recognize taxes as inherently good or bad. They just move money from one pile to another, so the key question is how well that money gets spent in either pile. If, for example, you cut taxes and as a result the private sector spends money less productively than it was being spent in the public sector, and the GDP growth rate falls, that's bad. If, instead they spend it more productively and GDP growth rates rise, that's good.
Still, there are other ones I can think of that aren't economic. I spoke to teen birth rates, already, above. Murder rates and incarceration rates are also good indicators to look into. Maybe infant mortality rates?
Agreed. Worse, IMO, they're both working hard to put party over country.
That "Captain of the ship" wording is interesting, because when you were talking about Congress holding the purse strings, I was thinking of a specific historical example of the president effectively forcing Congress's hand. Teddy Roosevelt wanted to make a display of US military power by taking a Navy armada on a tour of global ports. Congress didn't want to pay, but the budget had enough to get them half-way around the world. So he just sailed them half way around the world and Congress had to finance getting them back.
I'm not sure how apocryphal that is, but it's something I learned in school when we were dealing with Teddy Roosevelt's aggressive use of presidential power. And I think it does point to just how much the president really can act as the captain of the ship. And as I argued above, you can really see the results of that if you compare the Reagan and Clinton eras. If Congress mattered as much as the president, you'd expect those eras to be pretty similar in terms of policy, since one had mostly a Democratic Congress and Republican President, and the other vice versa. But they weren't actually similar at all. In the Reagan years we got huge military spending growth, in the Clinton era military budgets shrunk as a share of overall spending. Under Reagan we got radical upper-class tax cuts. Under Clinton, taxes on the rich rose. And so on. The bully pulpit really does allow a president to bully Congress to a pretty great extent.
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