Your Salary in 2016
By: Kevin Drum. Photo: Arjun Kartha. During his acceptance speech at Invesco Field in August, Barack Obama earned big applause for a line that compared Democratic and Republican economic policies. “We measure progress,” he told the partisan crowd, “in the twenty-three million new jobs that were created when Bill Clinton was president-when the average American family saw its income go up $7,500, instead of go down $2,000, like it has under George Bush.”
As rhetoric, it was effective. But was it a fair point, or a cheap shot? It’s true that the Bush expansion was one of the weakest economic recoveries in postwar history, but can you really lay the blame for that at the feet of the president? Isn’t it the case that, ritual campaign promises to the contrary, presidents actually have very little influence on the economy?
The conventional wisdom among economists says yes, but a growing mountain of historical data suggests that they may be wrong. In the postwar era, it turns out, Democratic presidents consistently produce higher growth rates, lower unemployment, better stock market growth, and less income inequality than Republican presidents. Nobody quite knows why, but the results are surprisingly robust.