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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs
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To: RMF who wrote (42853)4/22/2010 11:50:43 AM
From: TimF  Read Replies (1) of 71588
 
The Misery Index is pretty high right now

The misery index hit about 22 percent under Carter. Now its about 12 percent.

He Tripled or Quadrupled the National Debt in his 8 years.

An absolutely meaningless point as I've shown multiple times. The size of the increase is meaningful. Its best measured by percentage of GDP, but even real dollars isn't useless. But the size of the debt before the president come in to power isn't something that reflect positively or negatively on a president.

If you measure it by percent increase, you penalize presidents in your rankings, for having followed a president with low deficits and relatively low debt. But in reality the problem of increasing debt is far more severe if you follow a president who was a spendthrift, and added huge amounts to the debt.

To take your argument to the extreme it would be better according to your measurement to add ten trillion to the debt, if the debt was already ten trillion (then you have doubled it), than to add nine cents to the debt when the debt was a penny to begin with (because than you've increased it by a factor of 10. That shows the ridiculousness of your measure. And it isn't something that just applies at the extremes, its just clearer in such cases.
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