Reply #11: Mighty fine, radfringe!

[Lasher]

Here is the article by Michael Kinsley, which is mentioned at the beginning of the first article you shared:

Our text today is the statistical tables of the 2005 Economic Report of the President. I did this exercise a while back with the 2004 tables and couldn't quite believe the results. But the 2005 data confirm it: The party with the best record of serving Republican economic values is the Democrats. It isn't even close.

The Republican values I refer to are universal. We all want prosperity, oppose unemployment, dislike inflation, don't enjoy paying taxes, etc. These values are Republican only in the sense that Republicans are supposed to treasure them more and to be more reluctant to sacrifice them for other goals such as equality and clean air

Statistics back to 1959 make this clear. A consistent pattern over 45 years cannot be explained by shorter-term factors, such as war or who controls Congress. Maybe presidents can't affect the economy much, but the assumption that they can and do is so prominent in Republican rhetoric that they are stuck with it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20059-2005Apr1.html

And to bolster our conclusion that the economy does better with Democrats controlling both the Executive and Legislative branches, please consider this:



This chart shows federal spending as percent of GDP, sorted highest spending percent. Party leadership is at bottom. Blue is Democrat; orange is Republican. Top row is President; middle is House; Bottom is Senate. The top ten spending years - across three different Presidential administrations have been Republican years in the White House -- seven of them with Republican Senates (tempering the counter argument that spending is something Congress does that the White House can't stop.)



And with low taxes and high spending, the deficit has been a disaster under the Republicans. Fourteen of the fifteen worst deficits in recent history have been under Republican Presidents, the lone Democrat entry on that list was Clinton's FY 93 budget that was pretty much inherited from the GWB administration (none of the top 14 Republican Presidential deficits were immediately inherited from a Democrat.)

The Republicans do a great PR job of labeling Democrats as "tax and spend", but only the "tax" part of the label has any potential legitimacy. Spending - and spending when there is no cash in the bank to pay for it - has been a Republican trait for quite some time now.

http://thereadersbrigade.blogspot.com/2007/10/those-tax-and-spend-republicans.html

More charts here:

http://traxel.com/deficit/