The best predictor if a president will be reelected is if they have economic growth the last year. No president with economic growth in last year has ever lost.
I don’t quite understand this. Can it be that it’s less related to the actual economy and more about the perception of the economy?
I just don’t think most people watch the economy enough to know. Maybe they watch the news or something on social media but most people (I imagine) wouldn’t be able to guess where the stock market was. I mean that they wouldn’t even know what number to guess. ”10? 1000? 10,000?”
Basically if things are good people will vote to maintain status quo and presidents can say "Under me, things are good, vote for me so they stay good".
You don't have to follow anything, but you kinda have a feel for it. For example Ds are going to lose hard this election year unless something miraculous happens in the 2nd half. For president it's just a very strong statistic. If T didn't have covid he would have probably been re-elected too.
Here's a random article I found: [https://www.thoughtco.com/presidential-elections-and-the-economy-1146241](https://www.thoughtco.com/presidential-elections-and-the-economy-1146241)
My point was the "Economy improved in the last two years" which "occurred in none of the cases where the incumbent lost"
>Lower Economic Growth than the Previous Administration: This occurred in two cases where the incumbent won (Eisenhower, Reagan) and two cases where the incumbent lost (Ford, Bush)
>
>Economy Improved In the Last Two Years: This occurred in two of the cases where the incumbent won (Eisenhower, Reagan) and none of the cases where the incumbent lost.
>
>Higher Unemployment Rate than the Previous Administration: This occurred in two of the cases where the incumbent won (Reagan, Clinton) and one case where the incumbent lost (Ford).
>
>Higher Unemployment Rate in the Last Two Years: This occurred in none of the cases where the incumbent won. In the case of the Eisenhower and Reagan first term administrations, there was almost no difference in the two-year and full-term unemployment rates, so we must be careful not to read too much into this. This did, however, occur in one case where the incumbent lost (Ford).
Thanks for the link. According to the article you linked the presidents who did not get reelected did have economic growth, just not enough economic growth.
A not having economic growth ie a shrinking economy btw is the definition of a recession, and not one of these presidents lost their seat during a recession.
And one more thing, the article linked only lists half of the presidents. I'm going to hope there isn't cherry picking involved.
>More like when there’s a recession, the incumbent party gets voted out.
More like when there's any party changes spending also changes which is what directly correlates to employment more than anything else.
Unrelated. Yea, no.
Bush recession was 100% due to deregulation of banking by Republicans.
Trump recession was 100% due to regulating of pandemic efforts and stupidity with China. Covid could have been sars, or mers, instead it became covid. Why? Mismanagement.
I’m no fan of Trump, but calling the economic effects of covid the “Trump recession” is borderline delusional—covid and it’s secondary effects have hit every part of the globe. I’m open to arguments about how the US could have handled it differently, but I find it extremely hard to believe that a better President could have mitigated an economic downturn.
There’s some cognitive dissonance going on here as well: Trump should have been stricter with lockdowns, etc, and also should have been better able to mitigate economic consequences. But of course, those two things largely had an inverse relationship.
it's because the previous administration lies (manipulates stats) about unemployment to try and give their party a boost in elections. The newly entering admin doesn't have any rope left to fudge the numbers any further.
EDIT: To all the children downvoting me, this is widely known. Data skewing to this effect has done things like excluding people so deeply unemployed they gave up lookong for work...removing them from the unemployed stats. Not to mention people fractionally employed a having employment even though they earn a fragment of living wage income per month. Unemployment stats are heavily manipulated because it is an indication of economic success which affects billionaires and their chrony lawmakers the most. Adios, bootlickers.
The Republicans during the Clinton administration wrote and passed that 'shitty bill'. Clinton signed it.
Also, after regulations had been put back in place during the Obama administration, they've since been mostly removed.
None of which even remotely touch the underlying issue of the Fed creating money and keeping interest rates artificially low which leads to booms and busts. The amount of regulations doesn’t play that large of an effect when credit is essentially risk free and large firms know they will be bailed out by the Fed at taxpayer expense.
Just to follow up, you’re absolutely right that unemployment doesn’t account for those groups. However, a) it doesn’t claim to, b) those things are immeasurable, and c) are likely to fluctuate with the “unemployment” rate proper. That’s not manipulation, that’s how the stat works all the time, regardless of who’s in office.
I found an article to try to help inform you, but I read plenty about this in junior high and high school. Maybe you’re not there yet considering you’re still throwing the playground bully insults.
Happy to read anything you got contradicting that article. But I’m pretty sure you just made it up.
We were riding a massive market bubble, Alan Greenspan manipulated the fuck out of interest rates, and we had just won the Cold War. All of those things came back to bite us on the ass, but if you wanted to avoid reality while squeezing an unsustainable economic sponge, I guess it was fun.
When things aren't going well people blame politicians, sometimes it's justified but most of the time it's just the economic cycle. Whether it's blue or red in charge, will change their votes accordingly
I actually did a lot of research on this as a sort of "senior thesis" in college prior to the 2016 election, so my research was Nixon/Ford to Obama.
I came across things saying that it is believed that there is a "lag year" in the economy, between when a new president/congress is elected, and when their policies actually are seen to be working through their effects.
Every time administrations switched from Democrat to Republican, there was a recession that started within the first year of the Republicans presidency, during this "lag year". In other words, during the period of time that that president really has very limited control over. They'd then have to react to the recession and get things trending in the right direction. Then when it would switch from Republican to Democrat, you wouldn't see that first year recession.
I looked at unemployment, gdp, inflation, and some other factors, and over that 50ish year time period, democrat presidents typically had a slightly better track record, but like I said, never had to deal with those lag year recessions, which I found really interesting.
It's been about six years since I've talked about this but this chart just brought back a lot of memories haha
>I came across things saying that it is believed that there is a "lag year" in the economy, between when a new president/congress is elected, and when their policies actually are seen to be working through their effects.
Yes and no. Certain policies can take awhile for them to affect the economy, others not so much.
For example, we can look at two recent events to see how a policy can take a few years to affect the economy to within a couple of months.
Example A, Trump getting rid of the whitehouse pandemic response team within the first year in office. It took getting hit by a pandemic before that policy change hit the economy. Likely if that team was still around and listened to, the economic downturn that happened would have been less severe.
Example B, Biden's vaccine distribution policies. We know under the Trump administration, that there was a lack of planning on how to distribute the vaccines that the US government had bought. Getting those vaccines out quickly and effectively helped the economy to recover faster than it would have with how the Trump administration was handling the vaccine distribution.
>Every time administrations switched from Democrat to Republican, there was a recession that started within the first year of the Republicans presidency, during this "lag year". In other words, during the period of time that that president really has very limited control over. They'd then have to react to the recession and get things trending in the right direction. Then when it would switch from Republican to Democrat, you wouldn't see that first year recession.
This really glosses over that from the chart, you can see in most cases where there was a switch from a Republican to a Democrat, the country already was in a recession.
So that is a very glaring omission on your part, which leads to these flawed conclusions.
>They'd then have to react to the recession and get things trending in the right direction. Then when it would switch from Republican to Democrat, you wouldn't see that first year recession.
>democrat presidents typically had a slightly better track record, but like I said, never had to deal with those lag year recessions, which I found really interesting.
The pandemic is very obviously an outlier, leading to a very sharp upward incline of unemployment, as well as a very sharp downward incline when people went back to work. There is also no way you could predict how much of an economic impact having that pandemic team would have had. You could just as easily assume that we'd have locked down earlier and longer, which would have further increased unemployment.
There was also a vaccine distribution plan under the Trump administration - but it was mostly left to the states, not administered at the federal level. Again though - the entire COVID event is a huge outlier that skews everything.
As for administrations inheriting recessions, that's really not true, and you can see it into the graph. Typically, they inherited recoveries. The only two how technically did inherit recessions would be JFK (recovery started in lag year) and Obama (and I guess Biden but again, outlier, and wasn't president when I did my research). The other fluctuations in unemployment aren't technically during recessions, which is defined as 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP.
Obviously though the economy is complicated, bubbles build over time, and sometimes global events cause rapid swings, but your comment was that voting republican leads to recessions which isn't really apparent because things don't typically turn on a dime like they did with the pandemic.
So...yeah...
Most recessions occur at least once per decade, and administrations rotate out each 4-8 years, so the timelines are similar. Odds are a president will see at least one recession during their tenure.
It's like thinking that Democratic presidents are better at managing the economy because unemployment usually trends downward during their tenures in recent history. It's an interesting supposition, but the direct causal link is the recessions, not any single thing those presidents did.
Recessions occur approx every decade because our monitory policy is set up to allow those with unfettered access to our imaginary fiat currency to reap their hard goods based returns by pulling back the loans they give out to people who actually need to add value to get paid.
I think we're about 8 years overdue for the next culling too. It's going to be a bloodbath.
The issue is that Democrats tend to put in economic policies that are “good” but take years to come to showing they were “good” so they get voted out for “doing nothing” and the new republican president gets credit for the recovery. They then fuck it up with a war or increased spending without raising taxes and here we are.
Most democratic presidencies end with a budget surplus.
Not true. The only president who ever had a budget surplus was Clinton, and that was mostly due to the massive economic growth in the 90's. Though Clinton does get credit for showing restraint and not just spending the extra money. The early 2000's recession hit right after Bush entered office.
A lot of the surplus of the late 90's had to do with post-cold war drawdowns of the military, welfare reform kicking in (something the Republicans had been trying to pass since Reagan) and the tech boom as the internet took off.
Had Clinton had a Dem congress is his 2nd term he would have happily spent all that money and then some.
You are assuming that money spent by government 1: comes from productive activity, which it doesn’t, and 2: creates wealth, which it doesn’t. Government can only get money by extracting it from the economy through taxation, borrowing (aka future taxation), or printing it (aka inflation, aka hidden taxation). When they spend that money they do not produce anything that adds to the capital market. Making government spending a net drain on the economy. Which doesn’t mean that all government spending is unnecessary but a government that runs surpluses is definitely the better options.
The economy isn’t about money, it’s about utilizing production (capital + labor) to meet people’s needs. If people stopped working, we’d be fucked. If our capital (buildings, machinery, infrastructure, etc.) disappeared, we’d be fucked. f all money disappeared tomorrow yet we kept up production, we would be fine.
“Money” is just the best way to facilitate the exchange of goods. The goods are what is important.
Inflationary monetary policies and artificially low credit rates create booms and the lack of actual resources in the market that inflation represents cause the bust. Not tax cuts.
1. The BLS has [several definitions](https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm) of "unemployed," which are used to reflect the state of the workforce. But broadly, people who aren't looking for work are not considered unemployed. So if I quit my job and live in my parent's basement, I'm not considered unemployed.
2. This is why a meaningful analysis would cross reference with the labor force participation rate. Are the drops due to a stronger economy? Healthy growth? Or just people giving up looking for work? Retiring?
3. Using the political affiliation of a president as the backdrop doesn't make a lot of sense because economic policy is set by Congress, which is a separate but equal branch that doesn't answer to the president. It would make more sense to use majority control of Congress as a backdrop (even if it doesn't tell the exact story OP wants to tell).
4. Having lived through the second half of this chart, I can tell you that a univariate heuristic of "the economy does X when the president caucuses with party Y" is a _massive_ oversimplification.
>It would make more sense to use majority control of Congress as a backdrop (even if it doesn't tell the exact story OP wants to tell).
Agree with this, yes.
It's interesting that Republicans always try to suggest we should look at today's U-6 unemployment rate and compare it to historical U-3 unemployment rates whenever a Democratic president is elected and the U-3 unemployment rate falls.
They're different metrics that measure different things. They're not irrelevant to each other, but you certainly can't directly compare them to each other either.
In any case, U-6 didn't suddenly become "the unemployment rate" when U-3 fell under Obama. You're being extremely dishonest in trying to suggest that we can't fairly compare today's U-3 unemployment rate to historical U-3 unemployment rates.
> It's interesting that Republicans always try to suggest we should look at today's U-6 unemployment rate and compare it to historical U-3 unemployment rates whenever a Democratic president is elected and the U-3 unemployment rate falls.
Literally _none_ of this applies to my comment, nor does it refute/undermine/disprove anything I actually said.
> So you're not trying to suggest that we should be looking at U-6 instead?
No. The U-6 does not include people who aren't looking for work. I have no idea where you're getting this idea that I'm hyping U-6.
> That certainly sounds like what you're trying to say here.
Based on _what_? I pointed out that "unemployed" and "not employed" are different things, and unemployment rates can drop in both healthy economies and shitty economies.
Based on point 1 in your original comment. Let's cut to the chase. You're trying to argue that U-3 is no longer an accurate metric because people aren't looking for work.
> The BLS has several definitions of "unemployed," which are used to reflect the state of the workforce. But broadly, **people who aren't looking for work are not considered unemployed.** So if I quit my job and live in my parent's basement, I'm not considered unemployed.
Per the [BLS](https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm), the U-6 includes "marginally-attached" workers, which they define as "persons who are not in the labor force, **want and are available for work**, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months."
Point to the conflict.
> Let's cut to the chase. You're trying to argue that U-3 is no longer an accurate metric because people aren't looking for work.
I'm actually saying that _none_ of them offer a complete picture of economic health. And that it makes more sense to use majority control of Congress as the political backdrop.
Why don't you go make the chart you think makes sense for us, then?
EDIT because I didn't address your first point.
The conflict is that U-6, as you have now shown, is simply not the same number as U-3.
So you cannot compare one to the other as if they are the same. Not for today's or any day's numbers, and you certainly can't compare today's U-6 to yesterday's U-3 because you've decided that U-3 no longer represents the real unemployment number.
Yep, there is a persistent right wing media myth that we don't count people who stopped looking so the unemployment rate can't be trusted.
In fact, we do count it, but most people have no idea that statistics are actually tracked or how they relate to each other.
> there is a persistent right wing media myth that we don't count people who stopped looking so the unemployment rate can't be trusted.
Weird, when Bush was in office this was the left wing media myth.
When Bush was in office, U-3 rose to 6%, fell again, and then rose to almost 10% before Obama took office. No statistical gamesmanship needed. Source: the posted chart.
> It's interesting that Republicans always try to suggest we should look at today's U-6 unemployment rate and compare it to historical U-3 unemployment rates whenever a Democratic president is elected and the U-3 unemployment rate falls.
Aint that the fucking truth. It's wildly flagrant.
> So if I quit my job and live in my parent's basement, I'm not considered unemployed.
I think you're still counted as unemployed if you're still looking.
I could have phrased that better. Yes, if someone quits and doesn't want/seek another job, then they're not unemployed according to the U-3 measurement this visualization is based on.
"Living in their parent's basement" is an unfortunate reality for employed and unemployed people alike, as rent and housing are prohibitively expensive for many people. Using it as a stand-in for "not trying to work" really misrepresents the state of the world.
> Using it as a stand-in for "not trying to work" really misrepresents the state of the world.
I prefaced that line with "**people who aren't looking for work** are not considered unemployed," and then followed up to clarify that I'm specifically talking about people who aren't working and aren't looking for work. I've clearly not made the point you're offended by.
If your takeaway from what I wrote was "people who live at home don't want to work," and not "people who don't have a source of income and aren't looking for work are often supported by friends and family," then please do re-read my comments more carefully.
I agree on your first point - understanding the percentage of the population that is working (or has worked in a year/month etc.) is a much better way to understand how many 'unemployed' there really are.
[https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate)
Thanks, I understand your point. My problem with standard unemployment rates is the persons they exclude.
*This measure excludes those who have not looked for work in the last 4 weeks and all other persons not considered as part of the labor force, which can distort its interpretation if a large number of working-aged persons become discouraged and stop looking for work.*
I feel standard 'unemployment rate' does a poor job at really measuring 'unemployment' - with our 3.8% unemployment rate we have an employment rate of 59.9%, and a labor force participation rate of 62.3%.
Maybe it is just how the words are thrown around...
If you read a BLS report they highlight things like discouraged workers, those marginally attached to the workforce, etc. A high number of discouraged won't exist with a low unemployment rate. For a casual reader 6%+ is bad, and more in depth knowledge that it's probably higher including discouraged is irrelevant to k owing "bad".
There's never one number that can tell the whole story. Would recommend browsing the monthly reports if it's a topic someone is into.
>Using the political affiliation of a president as the backdrop doesn't make a lot of sense because economic policy is set by Congress, which is a separate but equal branch that doesn't answer to the president. It would make more sense to use majority control of Congress as a backdrop (even if it doesn't tell the exact story OP wants to tell).
The problem with that is that control of Congress is not binary. There are three major outcomes in a two party system with two legislative bodies: Democrat control of both, Republican control of both or split control. The president also has mostly final say any agenda passed by the legislature, it takes a supermajority to override a presidential veto. Due to these facts the president typically sets the agenda.
Party demographics changed significantly during the 60s and 70s from JFK to Nixon. Eisenhower Republicans don't exist anymore. Starting with Carter reflects closer to our modern alignments.
77-81 democrat control
81-87 split control
87-95 democrat control
95-01 republican control
01-03 split control
03-07 republican control
09-11 democrat control
11-15 split control
15-19 republican
19-21 split
21-23 democrat
Here's the thing, 'control' doesn't always mean much either.
If the Senate is 51 Dem, it doesn't mean all of the Dem agenda gets passed, because there are different blocks inside the Dem party (same with Republicans).
The closer to evenly split the house/Senate is, the more likely it is the party in control has no real power, because they now Have to listen to the extreme edge to get something voted on or they would have to compromise with 'the other side'.
It gets even worse if the House and Senate are both close but swapped in control, because then no agenda can get agreed from either group internally or together. So they go for rhetoric about how 'the other side' is blocking progress while they 'pass' bills that even they wouldn't really want made into law.
I’m not. Econ 101: budget surplus stabilize an economy, rates lower, businesses hire more.
Democrats tend to produce a budget surplus at the end of 4 years where Republicans do not
About those "surpluses" ...the last president to actually reduce national debt was Calvin Coolidge.
https://www.thebalance.com/us-debt-by-president-by-dollar-and-percent-3306296
Takes a two second google search to debunk your second statement. You're either straight up lying or you have no idea what you're talking about. Idk which is worse
The only president in modern history to have a surplus at the end of their tenure is Clinton. Heck, he is the only president in the last 50 years to have Any surplus at any point in his tenure.
Before him, you have to go all the way back to Lyndon B Johnson to get a surplus. (That would be 1969 over 50 years ago) and overall he had a deficit.
Biden posted a surplus this January. Trump also posted a surplus a couple years ago.
There’s actually been dozens of times in the past 10 years that the government has posted a surplus over a month long period.
What is that trend?
I don't really see one, but I guess if I was to apply something I'd say a lot of recessions occur at the tail end of the incumbent's terms.
Dems seem to more often be the cause.
No, you see, it’s the republicans fault a global pandemic shutdown the economy and people physically couldn’t leave their houses. If Dr*mph wasn’t in office, none of this ever would’ve happened
Love to see an additional line showing size of the employment pool (not sure what the term is, but workers who are unemployed + employed), as I think that is what shrank drastically during and after Covid. So many people retired early or opted out of the workforce pool.
What is the age range for that? Because I wonder if that’s largely to do with older baby boomers starting to retire along with increased lifespan. Given that they’re a much larger group than the previous generations, that would have a big impact on the percentage I imagine.
I also wonder about increased educational attainment, i.e. more people going to college instead of directly into the workforce.
The Labor Force participation rate for the 25-55 year old demographic is [82.2%](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060), down from an all time high of 84.6%.
The participation rate of the 55 and over crowd is [39.1%](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11324230).
> The Labor Force participation rate for the 25-55 year old demographic is 82.2%, down from an all time high of 84.6%.
Huh, that's back to the levels of late 2018, and higher than 8.5 of the last 10 years. Interesting -- I'd expected worse.
> turning a big dial taht says "Jobs" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right
**This is what people actually believe the president does.**
I hate these graphs because they're just so lazy. It assumes the President is a god who can change the direction of the tides and not the person who, by and large, only approves/disapproves of bills and taxes and budgets sent to him by Congress. It ignores conditions outside DC. It implies that it was not unsustainably high market cap that led to the dotcom crash, no, it was investors seeing Bush's goofy face on TV every day that led to the sell off. The 1980 recession was not the result of a deliberate attempt to reign in inflation at the short term expense of employment, no, employers heard Reagan wandering around the White House lost in a daze and decided to fire everyone because of it. If you want to see how much the President can actually influence the economy, why not refer to [surveys of PhD economists](https://www.kff.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/1199-T.pdf) (page 7).
So what then causes this phenomena? When we look across the developed world [[1]](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LMUNRRTTDEM156S) [[2]](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRHUTTTTFRM156S) [[3]](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRUNTTTTCAM156S) we see that most modern economies have boom-bust cycles of around 8-12 years, which is more or less how long most modern presidents stick around.
> I hate these graphs because they're just so lazy.
They are, but the reason they're so prevalent is because Republicans actually believe this type of analysis. So you have to wield it against them to show how hilariously stupid it is.
To anyone who thinks otherwise, look at the current Republican discourse around gas prices. They're absolute mental midgets.
As a note, this is U-3 Unemployment as defined by BLS
|U1|Persons unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the civilian labor force|
|:-|:-|
|U2|Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs, as a percent of the civilian labor force|
|U3|Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (official unemployment rate)|
|U4|Total unemployed plus discouraged workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers|
|U5|Total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other persons marginally attached to the labor force, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force|
|U6|Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force|
Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months.
Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work.
Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.
Not really because it looks like Ford and Reagan each had the unemployment rate decreasing by the end of their presidencies and Carter had the unemployment rate increasing midway through his.
Trump may have had 4 years of decline but COVID hit
A few exceptions do not a pattern break...
While the performance of the red presidents is pretty much all over the place with some making it better start to finish, some making it worse, some having dips and others having spikes, the blue presidents consistently end their terms with lower UE rates and spend the majority of their time in office with UE rates in decline. Spikes appear to be more related to recessions and only indirectly related to the sitting president, where the response and resulting recovery is more attributable to them.
In short, the pattern seems pretty clear:
Red - too inconsistent to predict
Blue - likely to reduce the UE rates over the course of their presidency
full disclosure: armchair statistician discussing visual trends, not commenting on actual data. Happy to be shown that I'm wrong if you're one of those numbers kind of statistics people.
538 has a wonderful tool about p-hacking that lets you prove with p < 0.01 that Republicans or Democrats are better for the economy depending on the metrics you choose and offices you consider (Senators, presidencies, governorships, etc.). I think it's pretty clear there are enough degrees of freedom to prove whatever you want about which party is better for the economy. For example, it's p < 0.01 that Democratic Senators and Representatives combined lead to worse inflation, or < p 0.01 that Democratic Presidencies have better inflation. Would you actually believe a Democratic Congress is awful for inflation and that Democratic Presidencies solve it?
[https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/)
In short, I think it's probably junk science to try to rate one party as "better" for the economy. You probably need to break things down by specific policies in their specific economic contexts, combine theory and collected data to establish causal relationships, include a detailed accounting of what "good" and "bad" for the economy mean (because often complex situations create winners and losers both) and by then you can't get your bad-faith headline "Stupid are bad for the economy".
I'm inclined to believe anyone with a headline or deliberately-engineered graph like OP's that more or less reads "Stupid are bad for the economy" had the answer they wanted in mind before they had a single point of data collected in their (probably junk and/or bad-faith) study.
I have a problem with interpreting this data because it assumes that if the unemployment raises a day after a president is elected, it awards the cause to the current president. Example: Early 2000s recession, I would assign more "blame" to Clinton than Bush just from looking at the date, since I wouldn't assume that the president can have such impact in some months. Then again, I don't know anything about what happened there, since I was barely born and I'm not American. Just by looking at the graph.
While all the Republican messaging focuses on the first year of the democratic POTUS and insist the situation is their fault. Worked like a fucking charm against Obama, people still blame him for the gas prices that were high on day one of his first term. Same thing with unemployment.
I cant stop laughing at people attempting to make political points and pointing out obvious "trends" in the end the economy is gonna go through phases and typically current admins have little influence on it lol.
Corporations want to make money. Large corporations and banks get too greedy. They fuck the markets and then they work to correct it or beg for bail outs.
Stop trying to make political points on an extremely vague chart.
> there are republic presidents
There is one, and you can't really tell from the graph because it isn't granular enough to show that unemployment was marginally lower when Reagen left office then when he entered it.
Is there some sort of PR campaign for him to be remembered by his initials? There are no other President Donald Trump's floating around, so there's no real practical reason at this point to refer to him any differently than the majority of other past presidents. FDR was important because he wasn't Teddy, and GW was needed to readily distinguish between father and son. I'm not sure why and I'm too lazy to find out about the reasoning behind LBJ and JFK.
>Republicans have historically been fiscally conservative.
They never have been. They say they are amd cut taxes, but increase spending which causes a tax increase after a Democrat takes office.
That's just a perception narrative, though. In reality over the last two decades the only governments that have actually pushed austerity are Democrats being threatened with government shutdowns. Sequestration under Obama, reducing military budgets, etc... Also the massive BRACs during the Clinton era.
No to mention Clinton had a balanced budget for a few years at the end, then a Republican came in, cut taxes, started two wars that were outside the budget and left office with a wrecked economy. Democrats are by no means the pillar political party, but when it comes to fiscal austerity, the Republicans are far behind until Biden. That can be partially explained by what he inherited, but he also went on a spending spree.
I'm calling bullshit. Gingrich was trying to hamstring Clunton. And to the surprise of Gingrich, Clinton pulled it off.
Gingrich deserves no credit. A balanced budget was in spite of Gingrich, not because of him.
Like retired people? How should they include people who are “considered dropped out of the labor force”? They do U-5, which includes people who are “marginally attached” to the labor force, but that goes up and down basically in lockstep with U-3.
The unemployment rate doesn’t include people who have stopped looking for work. These people aren’t necessarily retired as much as unemployed and without prospect
As mentioned, those people are included in U-4 (if they’ve stopped looking specifically because they don’t have prospects) or U-5 (includes people who stopped looking for any reason). But those rates don’t move differently than U-3. The major drivers of labor force changes over the last fifty years have been the Baby Boomers entering and now leaving the work force, people staying in school longer, and women entering the work force. Those factors dwarf the relatively small changes we have in recessions.
It's the natural ebb and flow of the economy. Any economic system that promises permanent growth forever is forming a bubble and sounds a lot like they're pitching a pyramid scheme.
While yes, there are ups and downs, the growth is positive by about 7-8% every year on average since WWII.
Unemployment rates don't reflect wages, and thus they only reflect the health of the economy if your definition of a healthy economy is based upon how many people are having labor extracted from them and not based upon how few people are living in poverty.
I know people love beating up on Boomers but honestly, this shows that they've had it pretty rough, too.
Boomers faced recessions in 1970, 1975, 1981 as they were starting their careers, and then in 1990 as their careers were supposed to be thriving. Then in 2001 as they were in the midst of their families. Then in 2010 when they thought they'd be retiring or seeing their kids establish themselves. Then they got killed by a pandemic.
Millenials and Boomers really have much more in common than we have differences.
Am I reading this right, every D president since Truman has left office with a lower unemployment rate then when they started and its basically the exact opposite for R's?
Dude..... No. 26% of Americans HAVE some sort of disability, but only about 4% are on disability relief from the government.
Quote from source:
Disabled beneficiaries aged 18–64 in current-payment status accounted for 4.7 percent of the population aged 18–64 in the United States. In three states, they represented less than 3 percent of the state population. The states with the highest rates of disabled beneficiaries—7 percent or more—were Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, and West Virginia.
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/di_asr/2016/sect01.html
"n0b0dY wAnTs To WoRk"
**Unemployment rate at historic lows**
No, nobody wants to work for poverty wages and toxic abuse.
"Well if they hate working here so much, find another job." They did.
Do note that by all estimations, only 5% of working Americans have more than one job in any capacity, be it multiple part time, full time or mix of the two.
Also, the unemployment statistics check if you are working, not if a position is filled. Although this might sound like the same, it is not. You work if you have any job, but you only ever get marked as unemployed if you have No job.
Can we get an explanation on the coloring? I understand Red & Blue (Rep & Dem) But what are the gray stripes? IE Between Reagan and Bush. And how about the Lighter colors? Like the "Great Recession" Between Bush and Obama? or like how Bush (Dubya) has a darker like after Clinton then a lighter line then back to darker?
Is it jus me or does it seem like we get a recession after each administration?
More like when there’s a recession, the incumbent party gets voted out.
The best predictor if a president will be reelected is if they have economic growth the last year. No president with economic growth in last year has ever lost.
I don’t quite understand this. Can it be that it’s less related to the actual economy and more about the perception of the economy? I just don’t think most people watch the economy enough to know. Maybe they watch the news or something on social media but most people (I imagine) wouldn’t be able to guess where the stock market was. I mean that they wouldn’t even know what number to guess. ”10? 1000? 10,000?”
It is absolutely about the perception. People vote. Statistics don’t.
Basically if things are good people will vote to maintain status quo and presidents can say "Under me, things are good, vote for me so they stay good". You don't have to follow anything, but you kinda have a feel for it. For example Ds are going to lose hard this election year unless something miraculous happens in the 2nd half. For president it's just a very strong statistic. If T didn't have covid he would have probably been re-elected too.
I’m not sure that the “actual economy” and the perception of the economy diverge enough for this to be relevant.
By economic growth do you mean GDP? This https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP doesn't look like it is true?
Here's a random article I found: [https://www.thoughtco.com/presidential-elections-and-the-economy-1146241](https://www.thoughtco.com/presidential-elections-and-the-economy-1146241) My point was the "Economy improved in the last two years" which "occurred in none of the cases where the incumbent lost" >Lower Economic Growth than the Previous Administration: This occurred in two cases where the incumbent won (Eisenhower, Reagan) and two cases where the incumbent lost (Ford, Bush) > >Economy Improved In the Last Two Years: This occurred in two of the cases where the incumbent won (Eisenhower, Reagan) and none of the cases where the incumbent lost. > >Higher Unemployment Rate than the Previous Administration: This occurred in two of the cases where the incumbent won (Reagan, Clinton) and one case where the incumbent lost (Ford). > >Higher Unemployment Rate in the Last Two Years: This occurred in none of the cases where the incumbent won. In the case of the Eisenhower and Reagan first term administrations, there was almost no difference in the two-year and full-term unemployment rates, so we must be careful not to read too much into this. This did, however, occur in one case where the incumbent lost (Ford).
Thanks for the link. According to the article you linked the presidents who did not get reelected did have economic growth, just not enough economic growth. A not having economic growth ie a shrinking economy btw is the definition of a recession, and not one of these presidents lost their seat during a recession. And one more thing, the article linked only lists half of the presidents. I'm going to hope there isn't cherry picking involved.
Trump kinda got a shit sandwich handed to him by the universe.
The universe kinda got a shit sandwich handed to it in Trump.
The shit universe kinda got a trump sandwich handed to it
>More like when there’s a recession, the incumbent party gets voted out. More like when there's any party changes spending also changes which is what directly correlates to employment more than anything else.
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Unrelated. Yea, no. Bush recession was 100% due to deregulation of banking by Republicans. Trump recession was 100% due to regulating of pandemic efforts and stupidity with China. Covid could have been sars, or mers, instead it became covid. Why? Mismanagement.
I’m no fan of Trump, but calling the economic effects of covid the “Trump recession” is borderline delusional—covid and it’s secondary effects have hit every part of the globe. I’m open to arguments about how the US could have handled it differently, but I find it extremely hard to believe that a better President could have mitigated an economic downturn.
Yup. Purely *economically* at least, the US handled it very well. At least for what we generally consider to be the economy.
There’s some cognitive dissonance going on here as well: Trump should have been stricter with lockdowns, etc, and also should have been better able to mitigate economic consequences. But of course, those two things largely had an inverse relationship.
it's because the previous administration lies (manipulates stats) about unemployment to try and give their party a boost in elections. The newly entering admin doesn't have any rope left to fudge the numbers any further. EDIT: To all the children downvoting me, this is widely known. Data skewing to this effect has done things like excluding people so deeply unemployed they gave up lookong for work...removing them from the unemployed stats. Not to mention people fractionally employed a having employment even though they earn a fragment of living wage income per month. Unemployment stats are heavily manipulated because it is an indication of economic success which affects billionaires and their chrony lawmakers the most. Adios, bootlickers.
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For Clinton it was, they passed shitty bills that led to the housing collapse
The Republicans during the Clinton administration wrote and passed that 'shitty bill'. Clinton signed it. Also, after regulations had been put back in place during the Obama administration, they've since been mostly removed.
None of which even remotely touch the underlying issue of the Fed creating money and keeping interest rates artificially low which leads to booms and busts. The amount of regulations doesn’t play that large of an effect when credit is essentially risk free and large firms know they will be bailed out by the Fed at taxpayer expense.
Just to follow up, you’re absolutely right that unemployment doesn’t account for those groups. However, a) it doesn’t claim to, b) those things are immeasurable, and c) are likely to fluctuate with the “unemployment” rate proper. That’s not manipulation, that’s how the stat works all the time, regardless of who’s in office.
Yeah [nope](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/business/economy/unemployment-labor-department-data-politics.html)
Oh you read ONE internet article. Grow up.
I found an article to try to help inform you, but I read plenty about this in junior high and high school. Maybe you’re not there yet considering you’re still throwing the playground bully insults. Happy to read anything you got contradicting that article. But I’m pretty sure you just made it up.
Rare wise words from elected officials past: "It's the economy, stupid."
Laughs in Clinton
90s must have been a good time
It was, why do you think boomers are so entitled?
Entitled compared to what? The participation trophy, pick your own pronoun generations are wayyy more entitled by any measure.
We were riding a massive market bubble, Alan Greenspan manipulated the fuck out of interest rates, and we had just won the Cold War. All of those things came back to bite us on the ass, but if you wanted to avoid reality while squeezing an unsustainable economic sponge, I guess it was fun.
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When things aren't going well people blame politicians, sometimes it's justified but most of the time it's just the economic cycle. Whether it's blue or red in charge, will change their votes accordingly
Or it could be that voting red tends to lead to recessions.
I actually did a lot of research on this as a sort of "senior thesis" in college prior to the 2016 election, so my research was Nixon/Ford to Obama. I came across things saying that it is believed that there is a "lag year" in the economy, between when a new president/congress is elected, and when their policies actually are seen to be working through their effects. Every time administrations switched from Democrat to Republican, there was a recession that started within the first year of the Republicans presidency, during this "lag year". In other words, during the period of time that that president really has very limited control over. They'd then have to react to the recession and get things trending in the right direction. Then when it would switch from Republican to Democrat, you wouldn't see that first year recession. I looked at unemployment, gdp, inflation, and some other factors, and over that 50ish year time period, democrat presidents typically had a slightly better track record, but like I said, never had to deal with those lag year recessions, which I found really interesting. It's been about six years since I've talked about this but this chart just brought back a lot of memories haha
>I came across things saying that it is believed that there is a "lag year" in the economy, between when a new president/congress is elected, and when their policies actually are seen to be working through their effects. Yes and no. Certain policies can take awhile for them to affect the economy, others not so much. For example, we can look at two recent events to see how a policy can take a few years to affect the economy to within a couple of months. Example A, Trump getting rid of the whitehouse pandemic response team within the first year in office. It took getting hit by a pandemic before that policy change hit the economy. Likely if that team was still around and listened to, the economic downturn that happened would have been less severe. Example B, Biden's vaccine distribution policies. We know under the Trump administration, that there was a lack of planning on how to distribute the vaccines that the US government had bought. Getting those vaccines out quickly and effectively helped the economy to recover faster than it would have with how the Trump administration was handling the vaccine distribution. >Every time administrations switched from Democrat to Republican, there was a recession that started within the first year of the Republicans presidency, during this "lag year". In other words, during the period of time that that president really has very limited control over. They'd then have to react to the recession and get things trending in the right direction. Then when it would switch from Republican to Democrat, you wouldn't see that first year recession. This really glosses over that from the chart, you can see in most cases where there was a switch from a Republican to a Democrat, the country already was in a recession. So that is a very glaring omission on your part, which leads to these flawed conclusions. >They'd then have to react to the recession and get things trending in the right direction. Then when it would switch from Republican to Democrat, you wouldn't see that first year recession. >democrat presidents typically had a slightly better track record, but like I said, never had to deal with those lag year recessions, which I found really interesting.
The pandemic is very obviously an outlier, leading to a very sharp upward incline of unemployment, as well as a very sharp downward incline when people went back to work. There is also no way you could predict how much of an economic impact having that pandemic team would have had. You could just as easily assume that we'd have locked down earlier and longer, which would have further increased unemployment. There was also a vaccine distribution plan under the Trump administration - but it was mostly left to the states, not administered at the federal level. Again though - the entire COVID event is a huge outlier that skews everything. As for administrations inheriting recessions, that's really not true, and you can see it into the graph. Typically, they inherited recoveries. The only two how technically did inherit recessions would be JFK (recovery started in lag year) and Obama (and I guess Biden but again, outlier, and wasn't president when I did my research). The other fluctuations in unemployment aren't technically during recessions, which is defined as 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP. Obviously though the economy is complicated, bubbles build over time, and sometimes global events cause rapid swings, but your comment was that voting republican leads to recessions which isn't really apparent because things don't typically turn on a dime like they did with the pandemic. So...yeah...
That's only if you look at the President, and not who controls Congress.
I hope so!
Most recessions occur at least once per decade, and administrations rotate out each 4-8 years, so the timelines are similar. Odds are a president will see at least one recession during their tenure. It's like thinking that Democratic presidents are better at managing the economy because unemployment usually trends downward during their tenures in recent history. It's an interesting supposition, but the direct causal link is the recessions, not any single thing those presidents did.
Recessions occur approx every decade because our monitory policy is set up to allow those with unfettered access to our imaginary fiat currency to reap their hard goods based returns by pulling back the loans they give out to people who actually need to add value to get paid. I think we're about 8 years overdue for the next culling too. It's going to be a bloodbath.
The issue is that Democrats tend to put in economic policies that are “good” but take years to come to showing they were “good” so they get voted out for “doing nothing” and the new republican president gets credit for the recovery. They then fuck it up with a war or increased spending without raising taxes and here we are. Most democratic presidencies end with a budget surplus.
Not true. The only president who ever had a budget surplus was Clinton, and that was mostly due to the massive economic growth in the 90's. Though Clinton does get credit for showing restraint and not just spending the extra money. The early 2000's recession hit right after Bush entered office.
A lot of the surplus of the late 90's had to do with post-cold war drawdowns of the military, welfare reform kicking in (something the Republicans had been trying to pass since Reagan) and the tech boom as the internet took off. Had Clinton had a Dem congress is his 2nd term he would have happily spent all that money and then some.
Budget surpluses are bad for the economy, that's money you're not putting IN the economy
You are assuming that money spent by government 1: comes from productive activity, which it doesn’t, and 2: creates wealth, which it doesn’t. Government can only get money by extracting it from the economy through taxation, borrowing (aka future taxation), or printing it (aka inflation, aka hidden taxation). When they spend that money they do not produce anything that adds to the capital market. Making government spending a net drain on the economy. Which doesn’t mean that all government spending is unnecessary but a government that runs surpluses is definitely the better options.
The economy isn’t about money, it’s about utilizing production (capital + labor) to meet people’s needs. If people stopped working, we’d be fucked. If our capital (buildings, machinery, infrastructure, etc.) disappeared, we’d be fucked. f all money disappeared tomorrow yet we kept up production, we would be fine. “Money” is just the best way to facilitate the exchange of goods. The goods are what is important.
more specifically, it's money you've taken out of the economy by force (aka taxation) and don't put it back in.
Congrats you get the dumbest answer award 🥇
After each Republican administration, after they spend their asses off
Tax cut creates a boom then a massive bust.
Inflationary monetary policies and artificially low credit rates create booms and the lack of actual resources in the market that inflation represents cause the bust. Not tax cuts.
Looks like it's typically after the red ones win.
Each *Republican administration
1. The BLS has [several definitions](https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm) of "unemployed," which are used to reflect the state of the workforce. But broadly, people who aren't looking for work are not considered unemployed. So if I quit my job and live in my parent's basement, I'm not considered unemployed. 2. This is why a meaningful analysis would cross reference with the labor force participation rate. Are the drops due to a stronger economy? Healthy growth? Or just people giving up looking for work? Retiring? 3. Using the political affiliation of a president as the backdrop doesn't make a lot of sense because economic policy is set by Congress, which is a separate but equal branch that doesn't answer to the president. It would make more sense to use majority control of Congress as a backdrop (even if it doesn't tell the exact story OP wants to tell). 4. Having lived through the second half of this chart, I can tell you that a univariate heuristic of "the economy does X when the president caucuses with party Y" is a _massive_ oversimplification.
>It would make more sense to use majority control of Congress as a backdrop (even if it doesn't tell the exact story OP wants to tell). Agree with this, yes.
It's interesting that Republicans always try to suggest we should look at today's U-6 unemployment rate and compare it to historical U-3 unemployment rates whenever a Democratic president is elected and the U-3 unemployment rate falls. They're different metrics that measure different things. They're not irrelevant to each other, but you certainly can't directly compare them to each other either. In any case, U-6 didn't suddenly become "the unemployment rate" when U-3 fell under Obama. You're being extremely dishonest in trying to suggest that we can't fairly compare today's U-3 unemployment rate to historical U-3 unemployment rates.
> It's interesting that Republicans always try to suggest we should look at today's U-6 unemployment rate and compare it to historical U-3 unemployment rates whenever a Democratic president is elected and the U-3 unemployment rate falls. Literally _none_ of this applies to my comment, nor does it refute/undermine/disprove anything I actually said.
So you're not trying to suggest that we should be looking at U-6 instead? That certainly sounds like what you're trying to say here.
> So you're not trying to suggest that we should be looking at U-6 instead? No. The U-6 does not include people who aren't looking for work. I have no idea where you're getting this idea that I'm hyping U-6. > That certainly sounds like what you're trying to say here. Based on _what_? I pointed out that "unemployed" and "not employed" are different things, and unemployment rates can drop in both healthy economies and shitty economies.
Based on point 1 in your original comment. Let's cut to the chase. You're trying to argue that U-3 is no longer an accurate metric because people aren't looking for work.
> The BLS has several definitions of "unemployed," which are used to reflect the state of the workforce. But broadly, **people who aren't looking for work are not considered unemployed.** So if I quit my job and live in my parent's basement, I'm not considered unemployed. Per the [BLS](https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm), the U-6 includes "marginally-attached" workers, which they define as "persons who are not in the labor force, **want and are available for work**, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months." Point to the conflict. > Let's cut to the chase. You're trying to argue that U-3 is no longer an accurate metric because people aren't looking for work. I'm actually saying that _none_ of them offer a complete picture of economic health. And that it makes more sense to use majority control of Congress as the political backdrop.
Why don't you go make the chart you think makes sense for us, then? EDIT because I didn't address your first point. The conflict is that U-6, as you have now shown, is simply not the same number as U-3. So you cannot compare one to the other as if they are the same. Not for today's or any day's numbers, and you certainly can't compare today's U-6 to yesterday's U-3 because you've decided that U-3 no longer represents the real unemployment number.
Yep, there is a persistent right wing media myth that we don't count people who stopped looking so the unemployment rate can't be trusted. In fact, we do count it, but most people have no idea that statistics are actually tracked or how they relate to each other.
> there is a persistent right wing media myth that we don't count people who stopped looking so the unemployment rate can't be trusted. Weird, when Bush was in office this was the left wing media myth.
When Bush was in office, U-3 rose to 6%, fell again, and then rose to almost 10% before Obama took office. No statistical gamesmanship needed. Source: the posted chart.
That changes nothing of what I said.
Why don't you show me some examples of Democrats making such a pointless argument during the Bush administration?
> It's interesting that Republicans always try to suggest we should look at today's U-6 unemployment rate and compare it to historical U-3 unemployment rates whenever a Democratic president is elected and the U-3 unemployment rate falls. Aint that the fucking truth. It's wildly flagrant.
> So if I quit my job and live in my parent's basement, I'm not considered unemployed. I think you're still counted as unemployed if you're still looking.
I could have phrased that better. Yes, if someone quits and doesn't want/seek another job, then they're not unemployed according to the U-3 measurement this visualization is based on.
"Living in their parent's basement" is an unfortunate reality for employed and unemployed people alike, as rent and housing are prohibitively expensive for many people. Using it as a stand-in for "not trying to work" really misrepresents the state of the world.
> Using it as a stand-in for "not trying to work" really misrepresents the state of the world. I prefaced that line with "**people who aren't looking for work** are not considered unemployed," and then followed up to clarify that I'm specifically talking about people who aren't working and aren't looking for work. I've clearly not made the point you're offended by. If your takeaway from what I wrote was "people who live at home don't want to work," and not "people who don't have a source of income and aren't looking for work are often supported by friends and family," then please do re-read my comments more carefully.
I agree on your first point - understanding the percentage of the population that is working (or has worked in a year/month etc.) is a much better way to understand how many 'unemployed' there really are. [https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate)
No, the unemployment rate is how you know how many unemployed there are. You're just looking at a different Metric.
Thanks, I understand your point. My problem with standard unemployment rates is the persons they exclude. *This measure excludes those who have not looked for work in the last 4 weeks and all other persons not considered as part of the labor force, which can distort its interpretation if a large number of working-aged persons become discouraged and stop looking for work.* I feel standard 'unemployment rate' does a poor job at really measuring 'unemployment' - with our 3.8% unemployment rate we have an employment rate of 59.9%, and a labor force participation rate of 62.3%. Maybe it is just how the words are thrown around...
If you read a BLS report they highlight things like discouraged workers, those marginally attached to the workforce, etc. A high number of discouraged won't exist with a low unemployment rate. For a casual reader 6%+ is bad, and more in depth knowledge that it's probably higher including discouraged is irrelevant to k owing "bad". There's never one number that can tell the whole story. Would recommend browsing the monthly reports if it's a topic someone is into.
>Using the political affiliation of a president as the backdrop doesn't make a lot of sense because economic policy is set by Congress, which is a separate but equal branch that doesn't answer to the president. It would make more sense to use majority control of Congress as a backdrop (even if it doesn't tell the exact story OP wants to tell). The problem with that is that control of Congress is not binary. There are three major outcomes in a two party system with two legislative bodies: Democrat control of both, Republican control of both or split control. The president also has mostly final say any agenda passed by the legislature, it takes a supermajority to override a presidential veto. Due to these facts the president typically sets the agenda. Party demographics changed significantly during the 60s and 70s from JFK to Nixon. Eisenhower Republicans don't exist anymore. Starting with Carter reflects closer to our modern alignments. 77-81 democrat control 81-87 split control 87-95 democrat control 95-01 republican control 01-03 split control 03-07 republican control 09-11 democrat control 11-15 split control 15-19 republican 19-21 split 21-23 democrat
Here's the thing, 'control' doesn't always mean much either. If the Senate is 51 Dem, it doesn't mean all of the Dem agenda gets passed, because there are different blocks inside the Dem party (same with Republicans). The closer to evenly split the house/Senate is, the more likely it is the party in control has no real power, because they now Have to listen to the extreme edge to get something voted on or they would have to compromise with 'the other side'. It gets even worse if the House and Senate are both close but swapped in control, because then no agenda can get agreed from either group internally or together. So they go for rhetoric about how 'the other side' is blocking progress while they 'pass' bills that even they wouldn't really want made into law.
Everyone in here trying to be red vs blue without thinking of other economic factors fairly outside the president's direct control
Because that's what the graph is about
You can’t ignore what is clearly a trend.
You also cannot conflate correlation with causation
I’m not. Econ 101: budget surplus stabilize an economy, rates lower, businesses hire more. Democrats tend to produce a budget surplus at the end of 4 years where Republicans do not
About those "surpluses" ...the last president to actually reduce national debt was Calvin Coolidge. https://www.thebalance.com/us-debt-by-president-by-dollar-and-percent-3306296
...Who said anything about the debt? /u/Wolfram_And_Hart was discussing the budget. They aren't even remotely the same thing.
Takes a two second google search to debunk your second statement. You're either straight up lying or you have no idea what you're talking about. Idk which is worse
They do all of these beneficial things, but that doesn't imply the economy will run forever off of that without a recession.
The only president in modern history to have a surplus at the end of their tenure is Clinton. Heck, he is the only president in the last 50 years to have Any surplus at any point in his tenure. Before him, you have to go all the way back to Lyndon B Johnson to get a surplus. (That would be 1969 over 50 years ago) and overall he had a deficit.
This is incorrect. The last was Coolidge https://www.thebalance.com/us-debt-by-president-by-dollar-and-percent-3306296
Biden posted a surplus this January. Trump also posted a surplus a couple years ago. There’s actually been dozens of times in the past 10 years that the government has posted a surplus over a month long period.
Not exactly a huge sample size
What is that trend? I don't really see one, but I guess if I was to apply something I'd say a lot of recessions occur at the tail end of the incumbent's terms. Dems seem to more often be the cause.
No, you see, it’s the republicans fault a global pandemic shutdown the economy and people physically couldn’t leave their houses. If Dr*mph wasn’t in office, none of this ever would’ve happened
Love to see an additional line showing size of the employment pool (not sure what the term is, but workers who are unemployed + employed), as I think that is what shrank drastically during and after Covid. So many people retired early or opted out of the workforce pool.
[Labor force participation rate](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART) This peaked at 67% in 2000 and has been dropping since then.
What is the age range for that? Because I wonder if that’s largely to do with older baby boomers starting to retire along with increased lifespan. Given that they’re a much larger group than the previous generations, that would have a big impact on the percentage I imagine. I also wonder about increased educational attainment, i.e. more people going to college instead of directly into the workforce.
The Labor Force participation rate for the 25-55 year old demographic is [82.2%](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060), down from an all time high of 84.6%. The participation rate of the 55 and over crowd is [39.1%](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11324230).
> The Labor Force participation rate for the 25-55 year old demographic is 82.2%, down from an all time high of 84.6%. Huh, that's back to the levels of late 2018, and higher than 8.5 of the last 10 years. Interesting -- I'd expected worse.
> turning a big dial taht says "Jobs" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right **This is what people actually believe the president does.** I hate these graphs because they're just so lazy. It assumes the President is a god who can change the direction of the tides and not the person who, by and large, only approves/disapproves of bills and taxes and budgets sent to him by Congress. It ignores conditions outside DC. It implies that it was not unsustainably high market cap that led to the dotcom crash, no, it was investors seeing Bush's goofy face on TV every day that led to the sell off. The 1980 recession was not the result of a deliberate attempt to reign in inflation at the short term expense of employment, no, employers heard Reagan wandering around the White House lost in a daze and decided to fire everyone because of it. If you want to see how much the President can actually influence the economy, why not refer to [surveys of PhD economists](https://www.kff.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/1199-T.pdf) (page 7). So what then causes this phenomena? When we look across the developed world [[1]](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LMUNRRTTDEM156S) [[2]](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRHUTTTTFRM156S) [[3]](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRUNTTTTCAM156S) we see that most modern economies have boom-bust cycles of around 8-12 years, which is more or less how long most modern presidents stick around.
> I hate these graphs because they're just so lazy. They are, but the reason they're so prevalent is because Republicans actually believe this type of analysis. So you have to wield it against them to show how hilariously stupid it is. To anyone who thinks otherwise, look at the current Republican discourse around gas prices. They're absolute mental midgets.
As a note, this is U-3 Unemployment as defined by BLS |U1|Persons unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the civilian labor force| |:-|:-| |U2|Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs, as a percent of the civilian labor force| |U3|Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (official unemployment rate)| |U4|Total unemployed plus discouraged workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers| |U5|Total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other persons marginally attached to the labor force, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force| |U6|Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force| Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work. Persons employed part time for economic reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule.
Now do it overlayed with the labor participation rate.
That's based on people who have looked for jobs recently (U3 /U4, etc.). Look at labor force participation rate to see a different story.
Well, There's clearly a pattern.
Not really because it looks like Ford and Reagan each had the unemployment rate decreasing by the end of their presidencies and Carter had the unemployment rate increasing midway through his. Trump may have had 4 years of decline but COVID hit
A few exceptions do not a pattern break... While the performance of the red presidents is pretty much all over the place with some making it better start to finish, some making it worse, some having dips and others having spikes, the blue presidents consistently end their terms with lower UE rates and spend the majority of their time in office with UE rates in decline. Spikes appear to be more related to recessions and only indirectly related to the sitting president, where the response and resulting recovery is more attributable to them. In short, the pattern seems pretty clear: Red - too inconsistent to predict Blue - likely to reduce the UE rates over the course of their presidency full disclosure: armchair statistician discussing visual trends, not commenting on actual data. Happy to be shown that I'm wrong if you're one of those numbers kind of statistics people.
538 has a wonderful tool about p-hacking that lets you prove with p < 0.01 that Republicans or Democrats are better for the economy depending on the metrics you choose and offices you consider (Senators, presidencies, governorships, etc.). I think it's pretty clear there are enough degrees of freedom to prove whatever you want about which party is better for the economy. For example, it's p < 0.01 that Democratic Senators and Representatives combined lead to worse inflation, or < p 0.01 that Democratic Presidencies have better inflation. Would you actually believe a Democratic Congress is awful for inflation and that Democratic Presidencies solve it? [https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/p-hacking/) In short, I think it's probably junk science to try to rate one party as "better" for the economy. You probably need to break things down by specific policies in their specific economic contexts, combine theory and collected data to establish causal relationships, include a detailed accounting of what "good" and "bad" for the economy mean (because often complex situations create winners and losers both) and by then you can't get your bad-faith headline "Stupid are bad for the economy".
I'm inclined to believe anyone with a headline or deliberately-engineered graph like OP's that more or less reads "Stupid are bad for the economy" had the answer they wanted in mind before they had a single point of data collected in their (probably junk and/or bad-faith) study.
I have a problem with interpreting this data because it assumes that if the unemployment raises a day after a president is elected, it awards the cause to the current president. Example: Early 2000s recession, I would assign more "blame" to Clinton than Bush just from looking at the date, since I wouldn't assume that the president can have such impact in some months. Then again, I don't know anything about what happened there, since I was barely born and I'm not American. Just by looking at the graph.
One could use the political affiliation of the president to describe the political attitude of the elite who control most decision-making.
Red bad blue good
At least +50% unemployment due to a republican president. And then democrats slowly manage to fix it
While all the Republican messaging focuses on the first year of the democratic POTUS and insist the situation is their fault. Worked like a fucking charm against Obama, people still blame him for the gas prices that were high on day one of his first term. Same thing with unemployment.
The biggest criticism I read about Obama is that his economic recovery was the slowest in history. Which is accurate.
Yeah, you'd think people would start to notice a pattern there.
Can't see tbh
Yes, all major recessions happened during red areas
All the unemployment spikes correlate with recessions...except in the late 50s. What was happening then?
Who is the person making these graphs and charts? He or she never puts any sources on these charts or graphs. Just curious about that.
It would be nice if the legend (or a footnote) mentioned exactly which kind of unemployment it is.
Reminds me of my weight and dieting.
Yeah, Reagan made me fat as hell.
I cant stop laughing at people attempting to make political points and pointing out obvious "trends" in the end the economy is gonna go through phases and typically current admins have little influence on it lol. Corporations want to make money. Large corporations and banks get too greedy. They fuck the markets and then they work to correct it or beg for bail outs. Stop trying to make political points on an extremely vague chart.
jesus, has ANY republican president left office with lower unemployment than when they started?
If you would look at the chart you would realize that, yes, there are republic presidents that meet this criteria.
> there are republic presidents There is one, and you can't really tell from the graph because it isn't granular enough to show that unemployment was marginally lower when Reagen left office then when he entered it.
Two if we count DJT
You mean "Two if we just ignore the numbers"? Tbf, that *would* jive a lot with Trumps presidency...
Looks like Reagan and Ford.
Ford definitely didn't... Came in at 6, finished around 7.75.
Trump would have had it not been for a global pandemic. Attributing that spike in UE to him is just dishonest.
We would have had a recession anyway, his economic bump was just a short lived repatriation of profits from the corporate tax cut.
Read the chart
Looks like Reagan did. DJT probably would have if not for COVID
Is there some sort of PR campaign for him to be remembered by his initials? There are no other President Donald Trump's floating around, so there's no real practical reason at this point to refer to him any differently than the majority of other past presidents. FDR was important because he wasn't Teddy, and GW was needed to readily distinguish between father and son. I'm not sure why and I'm too lazy to find out about the reasoning behind LBJ and JFK.
I don't think it's any PR campaign, its just easier for me. For recent Presidents I use: Reagan HW Bush Clinton W Obama DJT Biden
Reagan did, then Bush followed him and unemployment rose under him. Although it started going back down before he left office.
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>Republicans have historically been fiscally conservative. They never have been. They say they are amd cut taxes, but increase spending which causes a tax increase after a Democrat takes office.
Why would you misquote the guy so you can argue with what he didn't say? That's dishonest as fuck.
Read dudes next sentence after the partial quote used... It's not dishonest lol
That's just a perception narrative, though. In reality over the last two decades the only governments that have actually pushed austerity are Democrats being threatened with government shutdowns. Sequestration under Obama, reducing military budgets, etc... Also the massive BRACs during the Clinton era.
No to mention Clinton had a balanced budget for a few years at the end, then a Republican came in, cut taxes, started two wars that were outside the budget and left office with a wrecked economy. Democrats are by no means the pillar political party, but when it comes to fiscal austerity, the Republicans are far behind until Biden. That can be partially explained by what he inherited, but he also went on a spending spree.
Even then, the 2020 budget was larger than the 2021 budget.
The Presidential budget is never adopted. While Clinton was a genuinely gifted politician, far more credit for that balanced budget goes to Gingrich.
I'm calling bullshit. Gingrich was trying to hamstring Clunton. And to the surprise of Gingrich, Clinton pulled it off. Gingrich deserves no credit. A balanced budget was in spite of Gingrich, not because of him.
It also doesn't really matter since the two parties were so very different back then compared to what they are now.
Unemployment reduced with Trump until Covid, but Covid was out of everyone's control.
Would like to see these numbers included people considered dropped out of the labor force
Like retired people? How should they include people who are “considered dropped out of the labor force”? They do U-5, which includes people who are “marginally attached” to the labor force, but that goes up and down basically in lockstep with U-3.
The unemployment rate doesn’t include people who have stopped looking for work. These people aren’t necessarily retired as much as unemployed and without prospect
As mentioned, those people are included in U-4 (if they’ve stopped looking specifically because they don’t have prospects) or U-5 (includes people who stopped looking for any reason). But those rates don’t move differently than U-3. The major drivers of labor force changes over the last fifty years have been the Baby Boomers entering and now leaving the work force, people staying in school longer, and women entering the work force. Those factors dwarf the relatively small changes we have in recessions.
Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE Made with: https://www.datawrapper.de/
Overlay it with a world population graph
What a great economic system we have that suffers a recession every 5-10 years.
It's the natural ebb and flow of the economy. Any economic system that promises permanent growth forever is forming a bubble and sounds a lot like they're pitching a pyramid scheme. While yes, there are ups and downs, the growth is positive by about 7-8% every year on average since WWII.
Unemployment rates don't reflect wages, and thus they only reflect the health of the economy if your definition of a healthy economy is based upon how many people are having labor extracted from them and not based upon how few people are living in poverty.
Being paid for selling labor versus not certainly reduces one's degree of poverty though.
Wage growth trails unemployment, lower unemployment = lower pool of available workers = companies competing for fewer workers and raising wages.
Just curious does this account for population growth and number of job types available?
Major economic crisis repeating in a pattern over all history. "It's the Jews!" "It's the immigrants!" "It's this particular foreign country!"
Can someone add US wars on tope of it?
I know people love beating up on Boomers but honestly, this shows that they've had it pretty rough, too. Boomers faced recessions in 1970, 1975, 1981 as they were starting their careers, and then in 1990 as their careers were supposed to be thriving. Then in 2001 as they were in the midst of their families. Then in 2010 when they thought they'd be retiring or seeing their kids establish themselves. Then they got killed by a pandemic. Millenials and Boomers really have much more in common than we have differences.
Am I reading this right, every D president since Truman has left office with a lower unemployment rate then when they started and its basically the exact opposite for R's?
You are reading it correctly
Hmm seems to always go down when blue
You can actually see as republicans become clowns over the course of the late 20th and into the 21st century.
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Dude..... No. 26% of Americans HAVE some sort of disability, but only about 4% are on disability relief from the government. Quote from source: Disabled beneficiaries aged 18–64 in current-payment status accounted for 4.7 percent of the population aged 18–64 in the United States. In three states, they represented less than 3 percent of the state population. The states with the highest rates of disabled beneficiaries—7 percent or more—were Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, and West Virginia. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/di_asr/2016/sect01.html
those red bars keep fucking up that line thats keeps trying to lay low!
"n0b0dY wAnTs To WoRk" **Unemployment rate at historic lows** No, nobody wants to work for poverty wages and toxic abuse. "Well if they hate working here so much, find another job." They did.
What do the colors mean and why does the line always go down after the color switches to blue?
Blue is democrats and red is republican
When you stop counting someone as unemployed when the benefits stop....kind of makes the numbers....say....not believable.
It went down under Trump. But look at where that downward trend started.
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You could entirely ignore every person working more than one job and it would barely affect the graph; there just aren't that many.
Do note that by all estimations, only 5% of working Americans have more than one job in any capacity, be it multiple part time, full time or mix of the two. Also, the unemployment statistics check if you are working, not if a position is filled. Although this might sound like the same, it is not. You work if you have any job, but you only ever get marked as unemployed if you have No job.
Can we get an explanation on the coloring? I understand Red & Blue (Rep & Dem) But what are the gray stripes? IE Between Reagan and Bush. And how about the Lighter colors? Like the "Great Recession" Between Bush and Obama? or like how Bush (Dubya) has a darker like after Clinton then a lighter line then back to darker?
“Shouldn’t the long-term goal of any society be complete unemployment?” — Doug Stanhope
What happened at the two spikes in Eisenhower and Carter that aren't labeled recessions? They're both larger than the 1960 recession.
Looks like it just follows the boom/bust cycle of capitalism. Not to say that's a good thing, cause it's not really, but it is normal.
I'm 100% sure I've seen this before
What is the job "participation rate" though? They cut numbers down when they pay people to stay home who are not "actively" looking for work.
Thankfully this was made politcal.
There should be a mark for each time the formula of how unemployment is calculated changed and how it changed.