Lots of guessing and opinions in that post Bhack.

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Lots of guessing and opinions in that post Bhack.

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Which part of my post is a 'guess'? You're the one insinuating quid pro quo. Where's YOUR evidence?

'Maybe' is just the intelligent stance to take where certitude is not possible. You should try it some time!

THIS is not opinion:

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There IS historical support for associating better performance in all three areas with a Dem President.

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http://www.factcheck.org/2015/10/clinton-econ...democrats/

When we asked for backup, the Clinton campaign pointed us to academic research by two Princeton economists titled, “Presidents and the U.S. Economy: An Econometric Exploration.” The authors, Alan S. Blinder and Mark W. Watson, concluded after researching an array of economic statistics that the economy has performed “much better when a Democrat is president than when a Republican is.”

The researchers attempted to find out why and concluded, in a version of their research updated in July 2015 “It appears that the Democratic edge stems mainly from more benign oil shocks, superior [productivity] performance, and perhaps greater defense spending and faster growth abroad.”

The Democrat-Republican ‘Gap’

The paper looks at macroeconomic performance based on various economic outcomes and concludes, “The answer, while hardly a secret, is not nearly as widely known as it should be. The U.S. economy performs much better when a Democrat is president than when a Republican is.”

The analysis considered a 64-year period beginning with President Harry Truman and ending with President Barack Obama. In all, that takes in the complete presidencies of seven complete Democratic terms and nine Republican terms. Here are the findings on several economic indicators, and, in some cases, how they match up with Clinton’s claims:

Gross Domestic Product

The analysis found that under Democratic presidents the gross domestic product rose at an average rate of 4.33 percent, compared with a rate of 2.54 percent under Republicans. That translates to a 1.79 percentage point gap in favor of the economy under Democrats. That means that the U.S. economy grew by an average of 18.5 percent during the typical four-year presidency of a Democrat versus a 10.6 percent gain under a Republican.

Unemployment

The average unemployment rate was lower under Democrats, 5.64 percent, compared with 6.01 percent under Republican presidents, though the authors called that difference “small and not statistically significant.”

However, they said, there is “a very large and statistically significant difference in the change in the unemployment rate, computed as the average unemployment rate in the final year of the term minus the average value in the final year of the previous term. During Democratic presidential terms, the unemployment rate fell by 0.8 percentage points, on average, while it rose by 1.1 percentage points, on average, during Republican terms — yielding a large D-R gap of -1.9 percentage points.”

Income

Real wages, compensation per hour in the nonfarm business sector, increased slightly faster under Democratic presidents, they found. But the gap was not statistically significant, the authors said, despite Clinton’s claim that “income is higher” when a Democrat is in the White House.

Stock market

Annualized stock market returns for firms in the S&P 500 Index were 5.65 percentage points higher under Democratic presidents (the returns under Democratic presidents increased 8.35 percent compared with 2.7 percent under Republican presidents).

“Though business votes Republican,” the authors wrote, “it prospers more under Democrats.”

However, the report states, “given the extreme volatility of stock prices, even differences that large are statistically significant at only the 15 percent level.” That tempers Clinton’s claim that under Democratic presidents “even the stock market is higher.”

Recessions

The report found that the country was more likely to be in recession while a Republican president was in office. While Republicans occupied the White House for 144 quarters in the study period compared with 112 quarters for Democrats, 41 of the 49 quarters that the National Bureau of Economic Research classified as being in recession occurred with a Republican in the White House.

Inflation

The one notable exception to the Democratic advantage on economic indicators, the authors said, was inflation. On that count, “the economy fares about equally well under presidents of either party.”

Summing up, the authors concluded there is “a systematic and large gap between the US economy’s performance when a Democrat is President of the United States versus when a Republican is. Democrats do better on almost every criteria.”

Or as one of the authors, Watson, told us in a phone interview, the difference is “large and statistically significant, regardless of how you look at it.”

“The superiority of economic performance under Democrats rather than Republicans is nearly ubiquitous; it holds almost regardless of how you define success,” the authors stated in their report. “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.”

The authors said the evidence for better economic performance under Democrats remained even when factoring in such variables as the majority party in Congress and whether Democrats inherited “superior initial conditions.”

So what was the reason for the gap?

“We spent a lot of time trying to figure out why,” Watson said. “And we had limited success."

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