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Proof: Democrats Are Better For the Economy

We've seen a wave of news stories that Wall Street is scared of Obama, or the Obama will lead to a market crash or that Obama will kill the economy. First -- it's not like the Republicans have a lot to crow about here. We're currently dealing with the long term effects of Republican excesses and the results are terrible. Secondly - and more importantly, the historical record (those pesky facts again) indicate that Democrats are far better for the economy than Republicans.

The following charts are from the Liscio report blog.

The blog notes:

Democrats have a clear edge on GDP growth: 4.4% vs. 2.6%. Even if you start the clock with Truman in 1949 (eliminating the war boom and immediate postwar bust), the Dem advantage survives, with average growth of 4.5%. The partisan difference is widespread, too, not dependent on a few strong or weak readings: the blue bars stack towards the top of the graph, and the red bars towards the bottom. It might surprise some readers to learn that the Carter years weren’t quite as bad as some remember—though the inflation performance was miserable.

But Republicans are the party of big business! They know the economy! Actually, the facts indicate the Democrats are simply put better at initiating policies that help the whole economy -- not just small segments of it.

Democrats also create more jobs than Republicans. However -- here is a very important caveat. Over the last three expansion we've seen an overall decrease in the total number of jobs created. That is, the total number of jobs created during Clinton were less than Reagan and the total number of jobs created under Bush were less than Clinton. The point here is there is an overall trend in business to continually hire fewer and fewer people. The primary reason for this is two fold. First, there has been a massive increase in productivity over the same time period which means a business needs fewer people to do more stuff. Secondly, business has become more and more cost conscious and employment is typically the most expensive part of a businesses expenses.

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