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

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (40016)	12/29/2009 7:12:48 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

"Various political eras" wasn't really the issue, consecutive presidents of different parties are often more in the same "political era" than presidents of the same party separated by decades, but the comparisons we've been discussing focus on the party of the president not the time frame. If you want a shorthand for political eras, I'm probably not the person to ask. I don't really focus on everything as being of this era or that era. If you want some way to set up partisan comparisons between the different parties than in this case, useful and convenient might be at cross purposes. The easy partisan comparisons tend to be uncertain, if not misleading or even useless. In any case I care more about the policies than the parties executing them. I'm hardly going to endorse wage and price controls just because a Republican president (Nixon) pushed them. Even shifting to policies, rather than parties, to get clear results we have to go to the extremes. Going to the extremes we can see governments that try to take control of their economies, cause the country not to perform as well, to a great enough degree to reasonably dismiss the complications and alternate explanations as not really important compared to the level of government control. But falling short of that extreme you have to consider so many different issues and confounding factors, that you don't get simple, hard, obvious, facts to point to, you get complex interpretations and ideological and partisan battles.