Democrats, Republicans & the Economy

In the recent campaign season, and always it seems, there were arguments about how to most rapidly improve the economy. Republicans want tax breaks - believed to be an all purpose medicine - while the Democrats only want them for the poorest 98% of citizens. What evidence is there about the effectiveness of Republican vs Democratic economic policies?


Two years ago economist Larry Greenberg looked at economic performance over two 20 year periods (from 1961 to 2000) when Democrats were president, and when Republicans were. For each of these intervals the opposition party sometimes controlled one or both houses of Congress so the hope is by averaging over 20 year periods, many other variables will be minimized. Greenberg calculated real GDP growth, growth in employment, consumer price inflation, the change in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the change in the dollar against the mark or euro. His results were surprising:

Every economic indicator of growth did significantly better under Democratic presidents than Republicans!

This trend continued for George Bush - the last column shows the stats for his 7.5 years as president until August 2008. This is consistent with a statement I heard a few weeks ago - but don't have an authentic citation for: Despite the great recession, more jobs were created in Obama's first two years than in all 8 of Bush's.

If these statistics are true - and economists and statisticians can always disagree! - then there is no support for Republican economic policies and they should apologize and abandon them. But I've never heard of any politician apologize for any erroneous policy no matter how disastrous!