-The United States has had 17 recessions over the past 100 years. Thirteen happened under Republican governments, including the absolute biggest downturns: the Great Depression and the recessions of 1981, 2007, and 2020. The last of the four recessions since 1922 recessions under Democratic presidents occurred 42 years ago, in 1981 the final year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
-Economic growth? Going back to the Great Depression (Herbert Hoover’s legacy), the four presidents who logged the biggest growth in gross domestic product were Democrats: Roosevelt, Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton. Three of the four presidents who logged the smallest GDP growth since World War 2 were Republicans, the two Bushes and Trump. The one Democrat was Harry Truman at the end of WW2. Trump’s presidency logged the lowest growth of the four.
-Job creation? The six presidents with the fastest job-growth rate since the Great Depression were Roosevelt, Johnson, Carter, Truman, Kennedy, and Clinton all Democrats. The four presidents who logged the slowest job-growth rate were all Republicans: Eisenhower; the two Bushes; and, again in last place, Trump, the only president in the past nine decades to lose more jobs than he created.
-The deficit? Democrats are spendthrifts, right? Wrong! Ronald Reagan inherited a deficit of $78.9 billion. When he left office, it was $152.6 billion. When George H.W. Bush, left office, it was $255 billion.
It fell to President Bill Clinton to clean up this mess; by the time he left office the federal budget has a surplus of $236 billion. President George W. Bush, whose vice president famously said the lesson from Reagan’s presidency was that deficits didn’t matter, eliminated the surplus in record time with income-tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; when he left office, the deficit was $1.41 trillion. President Barack Obama halved that to $584.6 billion. Trump pushed it back up to $3.1 trillion, and Biden, in 2022, nosed it down to $2.8 trillion.
peakoilbarrel.com |
