A recent article appeared in the New York Times
Why Are Republican Presidents So Bad for the Economy?
GDP, jobs, and other indicators have all risen faster under Democrats for nearly the past century.
By David Leonhardt, February 2, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/opinion/sunday/democrats-economy.html?smid=em-share
The article began with this:
A president has only limited control over the economy. And yet there has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century. The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones (since Franklyn Roosevelt in 1933).
It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office. The gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success,” two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as “startlingly large.”
Here are a few graphics from the article:
Annual G.D.P. growth rate at the Start of a president's term
Six months later
One Year later
Since 1933, the economy has grown at an annual average rate of 4.6% under Democratic presidents and 2.4% under Republicans, according to a NYTimes analysis. In more concrete terms: The average income of Americans would be more than double its current level if the economy had somehow grown at the Democratic rate for all of the past nine decades. If anything, that period (which is based on data availability) is too kind to Republicans, because it excludes the portion of the Great Depression that happened on Herbert Hoover’s watch.
