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

To: RetiredNow who wrote (539309)	12/29/2009 11:22:12 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577147

If you want to compare things like this you need to use constant dollars.

To: RetiredNow who wrote (539309)	12/31/2009 4:04:28 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1577147

You have to include congress as well as the president, and most of the spending, most of the debt, and most of the programs which create the spending that leads to the debt, all happened with Democrats in control of congress. Even ignoring congress, and pretending that presidents had dictatorial powers over the budget (or alternatively pretending that congress was always controlled by the party of the president), such comparisons aren't very meaningful. You have a very small sample or presidents (apparently just 5 judging from the image you embedded, or really just 4 since we have only had a year of Obama, but even if you included every president since the Republicans 1st won a presidency with Lincoln it would be a small sample), with the differences between presidents withing a party on budget and economic related issues being larger than the average difference between the parties. Also the budget balances are strongly affected by factors outside of the decision making of the president or even the president and congress, including world events and domestic factors outside of their direct control, and also including policies put in place by previous presidents and congresses. When the adjustments you have to make for other factors are both uncertain, and larger than the actual "signal", the data your looking at, and your sample is small, the comparison is pretty meaningless. If you don't want to adjust for external factors, or congress, then fine the Democrats are the part of big deficits. #1 in deficits as a percentage of GDP, FDR, number 2? Obama. But really external factors have to be considered.