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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (39932)	12/28/2009 3:12:57 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

Simply referring to eras by the President that was in popwer at the time is just a convenient short-hand that everyone uses.. Convenient but not very useful, except as for purposes of partisan rhetoric. there ARE some historical economic analysis which have attempted to RANK what combinations* of Political Party control of the WH and the Congress create the BEST RESULTS for national debt reduction* Democratic presidents with Republican congresses do pretty well, but that's a very small sample. You can manipulate the data in a bunch of different ways, but most attempts fail to account for the factors I mentioned (policy delays, lack of similarity between the presidents of the same party, the effects of inflation, etc.), and also have two small of sample (even the whole sample of presidents since WWII is a very small number). The small sample problem is made worse by the lack of similarity mentioned above, and also that the time under consideration (Post WWII only, and not counting Obama since he's been in office less than a year), ignores the two presidents who had or will have the highest deficits in terms of % of GDP (at least since the Civil War, I don't have any pre-20th century data available), who happen to both be Democrats. Even if it wasn't for all the other problems, the lack of similarity in policy between presidents of the same party, combined with the small sample size would make the whole idea of such party comparisons almost meaningless.