I posted this elsewhere, but I liked
Michael Kinsley's recent op-ed piece on this subject so much that I decided to post it as my first diary.
I thought it laid to rest the oft-repeated canard that Republican presidents are better for business. In this piece, Kinsley crunches numbers (from Bush's Economic Report, no less), and finds that, looking at the years from 1960 through 2002, the economy does better with a Democratic president than with a Republican one.
It turns out that Democratic presidents have a much better record than Republicans. They win a head-to-head comparison in almost every category. Real growth averaged 4.09 percent in Democratic years, 2.75 percent in Republican years. Unemployment was 6.44 percent on average under Republican presidents and 5.33 percent under Democrats. The federal government spent more under Republicans than Democrats (20.87 percent of gross domestic product, compared with 19.58 percent), and that remains true even if you exclude defense (13.76 for the Democrats; 14.97 for the Republicans).
What else? Inflation was lower under Democratic presidents (3.81 percent on average, compared with 4.85 percent). And annual deficits took more than twice as much of GDP under Republicans as under Democrats (2.74 percent versus 1.21 percent). Republicans won by a nose on government revenue (i.e., taxes), taking 18.12 percent of GDP compared with 18.39 percent. That, of course, is why they lost on the size of the deficit. Personal income per capita was also a bit higher in Republican years ($16,061) than in Democratic ones ($15,565). But that is because more of the Republican years came later, when the country was more prosperous already.
My favorite part of this article is where he takes on likely Republican attacks on his analysis:
There will be many objections to all this, some of them valid. For example, a president can't fairly be held responsible for the economy from the day he takes office. So let's give them all a year. That is, let's allocate each year of an administration to the party that controlled the White House the year before. Guess what. The numbers change, but the bottom-line tally is exactly the same: higher growth, lower unemployment, lower government spending, lower inflation and so on under the Democrats. Lower taxes under the Republicans.
But maybe we are taking too long a view. The Republican Party considers itself born again in 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president. That's when Republicans got serious about cutting taxes, reducing the size of government and making the country prosperous. Allegedly. But doing all the same calculations for the years 1982 through 2002, and giving each president's policies a year to take effect, changes only one result: The Democrats pull ahead of the Republicans on per capita personal income.
As they say in the brokerage ads, past results are no guarantee of future performance.
Why the myth that "Republicans are better for business" endures, I don't know. Seems that successful businessmen could have noticed this 40-year trend. The Donald did. In admitting that he probably identifies more as a Democrat, Donald Trump told Wolf Blitzer that the economy just seemed to do better under the Democrats:
BLITZER: Do you identify more as a Democrat or Republican?
TRUMP: Well, you'd be shocked if I said that in many cases I probably identify more as Democrat. And I think you'd probably be shocked...
BLITZER: On social issues?
TRUMP: You know, it's interesting, I've been now around long -- you know, I think of myself as a young guy, but I'm not so young anymore. And I've been around for a long time. And it just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans.
Now, it shouldn't be that way. But if you go back, I mean it just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats...
Now why shouldn't it be that way, when it has been, for over four decades? Why is it that people continue to believe, in the face of the cold hard facts to the contrary, that the Republicans are better at managing the economy?