The Chicken or the Egg? By Irwin Kellner </thoughts/archive/bios.asp?Author=Irwin+Kellner> 5/5/00 5:21 PM ET As the presidential election campaign heats up, politicians are concerned about how the economy will affect the coming elections. For their part, however, the electorate is more interested in how the elections will ultimately influence the economy. And economists are pondering what impact, if any, the election will have on monetary and fiscal policy. These issues are intertwined, as you can imagine, but that does not mean that they are neither irrelevant nor unanswerable. So in the spirit of academic nonpartisan research, let me share with you my findings and conclusions. There is no doubt that pocketbook issues are important in presidential elections. While there surely are other factors involved, there is no escaping the fact that when times are good, the incumbent president has usually won reelection. By the same token, bad times have always meant bad news for the incumbent or his party; they have lost the election every time the economy was in a recession since 1932. As a politician of days past used to say, "let's look at the record." During the past seven decades, (cont)
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