During President Biden’s first year in office, 6.6 million jobs were created. That is by far the largest number of jobs created in any president’s first year of office. The current unemployment rate is 3.6%. I remember a time when 5% unemployment was considered full employment. The economy grew by 5.6% during that same period.
And yet I saw a survey where a significant percentage of Americans believe that the economy (specifically the unemployment rate) is substantially worse than it was during the Great Recession. That claim is simply nonsense. It does point to a larger belief that I find interesting. Large percentages of people believe that Republicans are simply just better at the economy than Democrats. This isn’t just the Trumpists that simply repeat whatever their great leader tells them to. I’ve known professional fund manager type people that parrot that line as well. As I do occasionally here, let’s look at the data.
Seems like the easiest way to compare Democrat to Republican Presidents is to look at GDP growth. After all, a growing economy would seem to be a pretty good indicator of how well it’s doing.
Let’s take a look at each President, starting with Reagan (the culmination of the modern Conservative Republican movement). I’ll list the total GDP growth and then, based off that, grossly calculate the average annual growth.
| President | Total Growth % | Annual Growth % |
| Joe Biden | 5.6 | 5.6 |
| Bill Clinton | 34 | 4.3 |
| Ronald Reagan | 31 | 3.9 |
| Barack Obama | 19 | 2.4 |
| George H W Bush | 8 | 2.0 |
| George W Bush | 15 | 1.9 |
| Donald Trump | 6 | 1.5 |
Not a great start for Team R. Of the last seven Presidents, the bottom three are all Republicans. Reagan is the only one that barely gets on the podium with a bronze medal finish.
That’s only one measure. Jobs are also important. After all, we’re a nation of hard workers that to a great extent identify ourselves through our careers. Therefore, whichever Presidents generate the most jobs must be the better economic President. Let’s take a look.
| President | Total Jobs Created (000s) | Avg Annual Growth % |
| Joe Biden | 6,600 | 4.5 |
| Bill Clinton | 23,620 | 2.6 |
| Ronald Reagan | 16,131 | 2.1 |
| Barack Obama | 11,572 | 1.0 |
| George H W Bush | 1,917 | 0.5 |
| George W Bush | 1,350 | 0.1 |
| Donald Trump | -3,003 | -0.5 |
Hmmmm. Nothing changed here. The Rankings are still the same. Reagan is in 3rd place and the remaining Republicans bring up the rear. Special kudos to President Trump for actually losing jobs while in office.
Oh, I know! I bet that the Republicans will win when it comes to legalized gambling. Let’s look at stock market returns. I bet that’ll be the category where the Democrats socialist agenda will be exposed!
| President | Total Gain % | Avg Annual Gain % |
| Bill Clinton | 229 | 28.6 |
| Barack Obama | 148 | 18.5 |
| Ronald Reagan | 147 | 18.4 |
| Joe Biden | 15 | 15 |
| Donald Trump | 51 | 12.8 |
| George H W Bush | 41 | 10.3 |
| George W Bush | -26.5 | -3.3 |
This time there is a change in the standings. Unfortunately, not a lot of great progress for the Republicans. Reagan is still holding onto the third spot, being just nosed out of second by Obama. The other three Republicans are still bringing up the rear, albeit in a different order. I’d known but forgotten that somehow the stock market ended up in a worse shape after eight years of W’s reign. The 90s was a great time to be in the stock market!
OK, things still aren’t going well for the Republicans. Let’s see if we can shake this up. The Republicans are always going on about how irresponsible the Democrats are when it comes to spending while they are the small government stewards of fiscal responsibility. So, let’s take a look at debt. Remember, low numbers are good here.
| President | Total Debt % Increase | Avg Annual Debt Increase % |
| Bill Clinton | 32 | 4.0 |
| Joe Biden | 5.6 | 5.6 |
| George H W Bush | 54 | 6.8 |
| Donald Trump | 33.1 | 8.3 |
| Barack Obama | 74 | 9.25 |
| George W Bush | 101 | 12.6 |
| Ronald Reagan | 186 | 23.3 |
This does bring about a change in the rankings. H W Bush is on the podium with a 3rd place showing. For once, the Republicans don’t occupy all of the bottom three rungs. Obama is beaten by Trump and H W Bush but beats W Bush and Reagan. For a supposedly small government conservative, Reagan really crushed that last place finish. No one else was even close.
Maybe I’m still not being fair. Perhaps we should measure greater macro trends. Perhaps it’d be better to measure recessions. If our country’s entire economy goes negative for at least two quarters, that should be a pretty good indicator of which party is better at not steering our national economy into a ditch, right? Let’s see who was our President when any one of our recessions over the last forty years was started.
February / 2020 – Donald Trump
December / 2007 – George W Bush
March / 2001 – George W Bush
July / 1990 – George H W Bush
July / 1981 – Ronald Reagan
Isn’t that interesting? Over the last forty years, every single recession started on a Republican’s watch. Every single Republican had a recession and not a single Democrat did. If you pull the lens a bit further back, you’ll discover that, of the last twelve recessions, going back to 1948, ten of them have been during Republican presidencies. Presidents Carter and Truman each had one. So, Presidents Biden (so far!), Obama, Clinton, Johnson, and Kennedy did not experience a recession. On the other hand, every Republican President going all of the way back to President Benjamin Harrison (back in the 1890s) experienced at least one.
So, what does all of this mean? Shockingly enough, I’m not saying that Republican Presidents are bad at managing the economy. I am saying that we need to stop the narrative that somehow Democrats are bad at it. The data just doesn’t reflect that. There are much larger global trends going on that are beyond a President’s ability to control (eg global pandemic, dot com market crash).
Having said that, it is interesting, and probably not shocking, that the party that professes to hold government in contempt, that supposedly wants to shrink it so small that it can be drowned in a bathtub, and that seems to be manifestly suspicious of intellectual competence and expertise would prove to be possibly not up to the task of managing an immense and complex 21 trillion dollar economy.
Just sayin’
dorkenstein 