Recent History of the US Economy
Recent History of the US Economy
How have Republicans fared compared to Democrats?
This is the last column where you can subscribe at the 60% discount, $2/month or $20/year. If you subscribe at the discount rate you’ll keep it until you unsubscribe.
Starting with the next column paid subscriptions will be $5/month or $50/year (best value.
Ongoing free columns will alternate with paywalled columns and all audio podcasts will be behind the paywall (unless I’m feeling generous).
I’ve been wanting to write this column for quite a while. I was hoping to publish it well before the election, but that ship has sailed.
I am not an economist, but in general it seems to me that during my lifetime our country has done much better economically under Democratic administrations than under Republican administrations.
Let’s start by taking a look at the US GDP starting in 1960 up until today
Click on the chart above to go to the original interactive chart.
Notice how the growth rate is positive during Democratic administrations and often either less positive or negative towards the end of GOP administrations.
Kennedy and LBJ were still riding the post WWII boom in the middle class. GIs were coming home and using the GI Bill to get an education and buy a home, at least they were if they were white. Black and Brown GIs were pretty much denied GI Bill advantages.
My father is one of the WWII GIs who took advantage of the GI Bill, starting a chain of generational wealth that allowed my siblings and me to do very well during the ‘50s until today.
LBJ left Nixon with an unjust and unwinnable war in Vietnam. In my opinion the expense and worldwide backlash to that war, which did not end until 1975, resulted in the recession towards the end of the Nixon/Ford administration.
Things picked up under Carter, but towards the end of his term OPEC started manipulating world-wide oil prices, leading to a world-wide recession. Carter probably lost a second term because of the oil recession and the Iran Hostage debacle, but I don’t see either of those as his fault.
I will say, if his presidential administration was a failure, he made up for it as an ex-president. I think he’s the best ex-president in history. And I didn’t even vote for him in 1976.
Then Reagan came in and started slashing government spending, regulation and cutting taxes, on the assumption that by making it easier for large corporations and the very wealthy to accumulate capital their wealth would trickle down to us lowly wage earners.
This has been tried over and over and over again by GOP administrations and all that it’s done is turn our country into an oligarchy with a very few very rich people, a hollowed out middle class and a growing population of poor and homeless folks.
George H.W Bush continued Regans’s policies, allowing Clinton to make him a one-term president with the slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid!”
Clinton out-GOPed the GOP by introducing welfare reform and what turned out to be a disastrous crime bill, resulting in the incarceration of record numbers of mostly black and brown prisoners.
That, and he couldn’t keep his pants zipped. Beyond that I think he was a pretty good president.
Clinton lucked out that there was a major tech boom during his two terms, which allowed him to turn over a surplus instead of a deficit to the president anointed by the Supreme Court in 2000, George W. Bush.1
Bush completely mismanaged the economy over his two terms, cutting taxes on corporations and the rich, starting two expensive and completely unnecessary wars in the middle-east and creating a completely unpaid-for Medicare prescription drug benefit so he could get re-elected in 2004.
The Party Of Fiscal Responsibility spent money like drunken sailors and deregulated financial institutions from 2000 to 2008, leaving the newly elected President Obama with the worst recession since the Great Depression in the late 1920s and through the 1930s.
Supply Side economics my ass.
Obama got the economy back on track and handed a well running economic machine to Trump.
The only thing Trump accomplished during his single term was a massive tax cut, mostly benefiting the very rich and large corporations. There were some small cuts for the middle class, but Trump and his GOP/Corporate buddies promised the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act would “trickle down” and increase wage earners incomes by about $4000/year. More on that below.
Then Trump completely mis-managed the global COVID pandemic, arguably causing hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in the US and pretty much destroying the economy.
Biden’s policies have put the economy back on track and I am hoping the Kamala Harris will be able to continue and improve on his policies, and maybe use strong diplomatic actions to resolve the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.
BTW, I don’t know about you, but I got a $1000 bonus from Disney where I was working at the time and nothing else that could be traced back to the TCAJA.
My wages did go up, from $11.75/hr to $18.50/hr in the six years I worked at Disneyland, but that was because of hard negotiation by the Master Services cooperative of several unions, not because Disney was feeling particularly generous.
Also, Disney still owes me back pay because Anaheim passed a law (Measure L) requiring business who had received city subsidies to increase hourly pay over five years.
Disney sued and lost. Interest is accruing on the back pay Im owed. I’m hoping for a relatively fat check one of these days. There’s supposed to be a hearing this month.
And that doesn’t count the three days pay Disney owes me for an involuntary three-day suspension for a safety violation I was later cleared of. I wrote about that in the column linked to below.
I doubt I’ll ever see that money, but the fact that I wasn’t paid after being absolved seems like wage theft to me.
I had intended to also look at inflation and employment in this column, but it’s already too long, so maybe I’ll get to them in a future column.
Again, I’m not an economist and most of what I’ve written is from memory and my interpretation of events is my own.
If you want to support my efforts and be able to comment you can start a paid subscription 60% off the regular price, $2 a month or one year or $20 per year.
Or send me a one-time donation of a dollar (or more) to SeniorGeek49 on Venmo.
You can find me at any one of these places:
I will never give up on this! SCOTUS was way out of line in their decision in Bush v Gore.