By Jim Bloch
Since before the Great Depression, the Republican Party has been associated as the party of big business, but the U.S. economy under Republican presidents has fared markedly worse than the economy under Democratic presidents going back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
There have been 14 presidents since the 1932 election that brought FDR into office and the economy has grown faster under Democrats than Republicans.
The trend holds true for gross domestic product, employment, income, productivity and stock prices.
That’s the conclusion of a study by Alan Blinder and Mark Watson called “Presidents and the US Economy: An Econometric Exploration,” published in American Economic Review in 2016 and updated by the New York Times Oct. 2 to include Trump’s administration.
In terms of annual growth in non-farm jobs, Trump’s administration was the worst performing, finishing 14th out of 14. Ditto for gross domestic product. FDR’s topped both categories.
“The six presidents who have presided over the fastest job growth have all been Democrats…,” the Times said. The presidents were FDR, LBJ, Carter, Truman, JFK and Clinton. “The four presidents who have presided over the slowest growth have all been Republicans.” They were led by Trump, the only president since the Great Depression with negative job growth, followed by G.W. Bush, G.H.W. Bush and Eisenhower.
Donald Trump, in his official White House portrait by Shealah Craighead, oversaw the worst economic numbers since the Great Depression.
“The U.S. economy performs much better when a Democrat is president than when a Republican is,” said Blinder and Watson. “The superiority of economic performance under Democrats rather than Republicans is nearly ubiquitous: it holds almost regardless of how you define success. By many measures, the performance gap is startlingly large—so large, in fact, that it strains credulity, given how little influence over the economy most economists (or the Constitution, for that matter) assign to the president of the United States.”
From 1932 to 2020, the US economy grew at an annual rate of 3.33 percent. But under Democratic administrations, the growth rate was 4.33 percent per year. Under Republicans, it was 2.54 percent, a difference the authors called “astoundingly large.”
The Times found growth rates of 4.6 percent under Democrats and 2.4 under Republicans.
“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,” the Times said.
The question is why. The Times talked to a number of economists and economic historians, who basically could not explain the phenomenon.
The Times concluded that Democrats were economically more pragmatic.
“Democrats have been more willing to heed economic and historical lessons about what policies actually strengthen the economy, while Republicans have often clung to theories that they want to believe — like the supposedly magical power of tax cuts and deregulation,” the Times said.
For example, Trump’s tax cuts for the super rich did not spur the economy. They just further fueled economic inequality.
The bottom line: If you want the rich to get richer and the economy to suffer, vote Republican.
Jim Bloch is a freelance writer based in St. Clair, Michigan. Contact him at bloch.jim@gmail.com.
