Add me to the group that hopes Mental Floss stays far away from political posts of this sort.

reCAPTCHA: and funked

interesting how impressions of “dems” and “reps” is so different from reality. Looking at the last 3 “rep” presidents (since ‘80), they all enlarged government, expanded the gap between rich and poor and spent us into a budget deficit. When did we have a budget surplus and growing middle class? Under the “dem” president Clinton.

The author put his disclaimers at the beginning and let it be known. If you still read and got offended instead of trying to add some insiteful words to the comments, that’s your fault. He wanted civilized debate not ‘I’ll take my toys and go home’.

I would like to see these same statistics for Congress and the President instead of just the President. Both have influence in this I believe.

Either way, I think we as Americans need to realize that we’ll never see eye to eye on just about everything. Instead we should work on agreeing on the things that are best for the majority of Americans. One of the most telling facts about these statistics is that our GNP goes up when both parties are in office. That’s something that no one else in the world can really claim. We have it pretty dang good.

Since it won’t let me post links, there is also a very similar story with the current candidates and taxes on a website entitled 20somethingfinance. Look it up since ya can’t post links on here.

The author put his disclaimers at the beginning and let it be known. If you still read and got offended instead of trying to add some insiteful words to the comments, that’s your fault. He wanted civilized debate not ‘I’ll take my toys and go home’.

I would like to see these same statistics for Congress and the President instead of just the President. Both have influence in this I believe.

Either way, I think we as Americans need to realize that we’ll never see eye to eye on just about everything. Instead we should work on agreeing on the things that are best for the majority of Americans. One of the most telling facts about these statistics is that our GNP goes up when both parties are in office. That’s something that no one else in the world can really claim. We have it pretty d@mn good.

Since it won’t let me post links, there is also a very similar story with the current candidates snd taxes on a website entitled 20somethingfinance. Look it up since ya can’t post links on here.

First, the author correctly pointed out that the president isn’t entirely responsible for economic growth rate. The parts not controlled by the president are influenced by a lot of factors like the policies of the head of the Federal reserve, congress, and of course a lot of noise in the data. Many, Many one time events that were not under the control of anyone in government have occured over the past 50 years. But if we wish to “blame” a given political party we should also examine who the majority party in congress is too at these times.

Secondly, another poster hit the nail on the head saying that coorialation isn’t causation. I have seen no evidence here that choosing a democratic/republican president will have any impact at all on the growth rate of the economy good or bad.

Thirdly, a different poster was dead on about time delays. The health of the economy in a new presidents first year in office probably has more to do with the last president, just because policy takes time to actually effect the growth of the economy. Lots of other things have much larger delays. Like bubbles. Housing bubbles, credit bubbles, stock market bubbles. Oh, and don’t forget wars. Debt is a huge one too. Debt is a big one too. Bushes recent tax rebate helpped the economy tremendiously, but that debt is going to get passed off to the next guy to deal with, and if the economy drops because the next guy does the responsible thing and pays it off, he will get blamed, and his numbers in this study will show poorly. While no administration can clean their hands of bubbles, wars, or economic downturn in their administration, all of these events are generally brewing or “in the works” for long before the inaguration.

Finally, my own point, is that we are looking at averages over the 57 year period. Averages can be extremely deceptive. Here they are especially decieving because it isn’t giving us a good idea of what happened over those 50 years. If you examine the underlying data, you would no doubt see that most presidents were able to keep a reasonable amount of steady growth around 3% for most of their term, except those times when there have been large crashes where no growth or negative growth is experienced. More of these crashes have happened under republican presidents, so that is what is causing a lower average and not a “generally poorer performance” as someone might guess from the average. And going back to point 3, you can hardly rest all of the blame on the current administration, and going back to point one, even the amount of blame on the current administration can hardly be placed on the president’s party.

Interesting approach though. The article is an interesting read and does follow along side many of the things I’ve read about income disparity lately. The problem is these studies can be extremely and easily manipulated if desired by the authors… for example, why start in 1948? (well WWII obviously… but we’ve had many wars since that have impacted the economy in various ways giving the president of the time credit/blame for the events). Just one of many decisions the author gets to make that can extemely affect the outcome, especially if the author chooses them to be intentionally so to make his point more interesting… could you imagine doing all that work just to show democrates and republicans are the same? how boring.

Is it possible that the economy is cyclical and that when times are good, people lean towards candidates preaching lower taxes, business growth, and individual fiscal responsibility (typically republican). And when times are bad, people lean towards candidates preaching entitlements, higher taxes on the wealthy, and government-run programs (typically democrat). If this were the case, this trend could be seen as reactionary where the candidates are voted in based on the prior economic season, and are in office while the next economic season inevitably comes around.

I could be wrong, but the point is that statistics never come close to telling the whole story.

I would also add that I was dissapointed to see this article on this site. If this is what this site is going to turn into, I will probably visit less frequently.