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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (360028)	11/27/2007 1:57:09 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571214

Why? Well if it really has, I don't know why. Perhaps Democratic presidents restrict increases in manufacturing productivity to a greater extent than Republican presidents do. Or considering the fact that your comparing only a pretty small number of presidents you don't have sufficient numbers for other factors to balance out and the reasons may be mostly unrelated to who was president. With you have relativly few data points, and you have many factors other than the one you want to measure, its hard to draw any solid conclusions. Or its possible that if there is some causation it could work in the other direction. If you have presidencies with greater increase of manufacturing productivity, and thus more lose of manufacturing employment, that could cause a temporary increase in support for Democrats. Than their could be a reversion to the norm and manufacturing employment might not decrease as much. it also speaks to the whole notion of tax cuts for corporations and private citizens promoted by the GOP. If tax cuts were so good, why doesn't the economic statistics reflect that premise? What statistic are you using to measure the premise? Manufacturing employment? That's a little to narrow to represent the health of the economy. Also you could use manufacturing productivity (also an economic stat) and possibly get near the opposite result. And that's not even considering who controlled congress at the time, or any possible delay in the positive and/or negative effects of presidential policies.

To: tejek who wrote (360028)	9/18/2008 8:28:30 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571214

Why does the economy do better with a GOP congress? "Under Republican Congresses, stocks have averaged a 19% return, while under Democratic Congresses only 11.9%. Real GDP growth, lagged two years, has averaged 3.7% under Republican Congresses, and only 3.2% under Democratic ones." online.wsj.com If the presidential and congressional stats really told us anything about the future (and they don't) then we should elect Obama, but also toss out the Dems in congress... But mainly the stats are useless, not only are circumstances different at different times when these political changes happen, and also the effects of a policy change might take time to take effect, and also might last for years after the benefits start, but also different Republican and Democratic presidents and congresses operate very differently. As the article I link to above points out - "First, not all Democrats act like Democrats, and not all Republicans act like Republicans. John F. Kennedy, for example, was an enthusiastic supply-side tax cutter, and George H.W. Bush raised taxes. Bill Clinton promoted free trade, and Richard Nixon imposed wage and price controls." And for congresses you get the same thing, since congresses are groups of people, and since the minority has an influence, on the average the swings are not probably as great, but for example compare the early Republican congressional majority under Gingrich (who worked harder to restrain the growth of federal spending than any congress in my lifetime, to the Republican congress that lost to the Dems in the last congressional election, that spent money hand over fist. Edit - More on the weekness of the data "People, no matter how you slice them, these numbers can't at all be taken as evidence about what market performance would be in the future under different Presidents or about how the market would have faired if George McGovern would have beaten Nixon because they don't take into account any of the other massively important factors that affect market performance. Give a couple of examples, would there have been no oil shocks in the 70s if Nixon were not President? Would the tech boom not have happened if Clinton were not president? Of course our beloved editorial writer is a sophisticated guy and does bring in another factor later in the article: Congress!!! "If the electorate were really smart, it would elect a Democratic president and a Republican Congress. Under that deal, stocks have averaged a 20.2% total return" Again, awesome. That combo in this sample is the last 6 years of Clinton. So the tech boom happened because of a Democratic prez and a Republican congress. Elect that combo again and presto, another boom. It's just that simple eh?"