THE ECONOMY PERFORMS BETTER UNDER DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTS

I’ve written before about the fact that the economy has historically performed better under Democratic Presidents than under Republicans. With the economy booming under President Biden, this pattern is both being confirmed and extended, and it’s receiving some attention. For example, Heather Cox Richardson, an historian, wrote the following in her Feb. 5, 2022, blog post:

“The economy has boomed under President Joe Biden, putting the lie to the old trope that Democrats don’t manage the economy as well as Republicans.

This should not come as a surprise to anyone. The economy has performed better under Democrats than Republicans since at least World War II. CNN Business reports that since 1945, the Standard & Poor’s 500—a market index of 500 leading U.S. publicly traded companies—has averaged an annual gain of 11.2% during years when Democrats controlled the White House, and a 6.9% average gain under Republicans. In the same time period, gross domestic product grew by an average of 4.1% under Democrats, 2.5% under Republicans. Job growth, too, is significantly stronger under Democrats than Republicans.

“[T]here has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century,” wrote David Leonhardt of the New York Timeslast year, “The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.”

The persistence of the myth that Democrats are bad for the economy is an interesting example of the endurance of political rhetoric over reality. …

In the end, the economists Leonhardt interviewed last year think [that] behind Democrats’ ability to manage the economy better than Republicans [is the fact that] Republicans tend to cling to abstract theories about how the economy works—theories about high tariffs or tax cuts, for example, which tend to concentrate wealth upward—while Democrats are more pragmatic, willing to pay attention to facts on the ground and to historical lessons about what works and what doesn’t.”

You can read the rest of her post with its more in-depth interesting historical perspective here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-5-2022