[Vision2020] The Genessee sign lies
Brian Dennis
dr_of_chaos at yahoo.com
Tue Nov 2 07:59:16 PDT 2010
Hello Viz:
I occasionally lurk and read posts in the archive of this lively and enjoyable list. I joined up to refute a damnable lie posted here yesterday, that of the Genessee sign.
There is not a shred of evidence that Democrats produce more unemployment, less paychecks, etc. than Republicans. Far from it; Democrats have been on average better stewards of the economy than Republicans, in just about every measure.
For example, let us compare the last year of the Bush Presidency with the most recent year of the Obama presidency.
2008: last year of Bush presidency
2010: most recent year of Obama presidency
In 2008, an average of 317,250 private sector jobs per month were lost. In 2010, an average of 95,888 private sector jobs per month were gained.
source:
http://www.bls.gov/data/#employment
Everyone in the world except the Fox News audience has seen the famous "bikini graph", now updated to show monthly gains and losses of PRIVATE SECTOR jobs, colored according to Bush months (red) and Obama months (blue):
http://www.thepoliticalcarnival.net/2010/10/rachel-maddows-updated-bikini-graph-cbo-surplusdeficit-chart/
In Federal FY2009 (Oct 1, 2008 - Sep 30 2009), the Bush Administration's final budget, the budget deficit was $1.416 trillion. In FY2010 (Oct 1 2009 - Sep 30 2010), the first budget of the Obama Administration, the budget deficit was $1.291 trillion.
source:
http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/119xx/doc11936/SeptemberMBR.pdf
On Bush's final day in office, the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 closed at 7,949, 1,440, and 805, respectively. Today's closing prices were 11,125, 2,505, and 1,184.
Ok, I agree that Bush v Obama might be a narrow comparison (but highly relevant to the choice in the current election). So, now let us look at Democratic and Republican presidents collectively.
I assembled a data set (below) from the "2010 Economic Report of the
President." The report is available online:
www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/index.html
Six variables (columns) are in the data set:
YEAR (1960-2009) I started the data in 1960, as a sort of general
beginning to the "modern" government/budget/economic era. The 2010 data will be made available at the website in the spring.
UNEMPLOY civilian unemployment rate, in percent.
SURPLUS surplus (positive) or deficit (negative) in federal budget, as
percent of gross domestic product.
GDPGROWTH percent change, over previous year, in the real gross
domestic product.
INFLATION percent change in special consumer price index, december to
december.
PARTY political party of president responsible for that budget year,
R=republican, D=democrat. One of the most important things that a president does to influence the economy is prepare/propose/haggle/& eventually sign, a federal budget. The federal budget in the first year of a president's term is set by the president in the previous year, so I used this as a time lag. For instance, 1960 was a republican year; Kennedy took office in January, 1961, but he had effectively no budgetary influence until the new federal fiscal year began in the following October. Thus, I assigned 1961 as a republican year as well.
The idea for this data set came from Michael Kinsley, writing for the Los
Angeles Times, in an opinion column published in August, 2004. He took some of these variables and calculated & compared MEANS only! No consideration at all of variability, let alone any attempt at valid statistical inferences.
Results are summarized in the four graphs in the picture (png format) attached to this post. The graphs are “box plots,” for each variable, broken down by party. In each box, the middle horizontal line is the median, the lower and upper ends of the box are the 25th and 75th percentiles, and the ends of the “whiskers” show the locations of the lowest and highest values in the data.
The means (not the same as the medians) are not shown.
In a nutshell:
Upper left graph. Democratic presidents have been associated with lower unemployment. The difference in the unemployment distributions is statistically significant (a difference this extreme is highly unlikely to have resulted by chance). Details of the conservative and robust statistical significance tests (Kruskal-Wallis tests) are not shown.
Upper right graph. Democratic presidents have been associated on average with higher budget surplus (or lower deficit). The difference is statistically significant.
Lower left graph. Democratic presidents have been associated with higher GDP growth than Republican presidents. The difference is statistically significant.
Lower right graph. Democratic presidents have been associated with slightly lower inflation (Dems slightly lower median). The difference is statistically significant (barely).
In conclusion, if you advocate Republican economic policies, just say so; you have a right to your I-got-mine-and-the-rest-of-you-can-go-to-hell point of view. However, the claim that under Republican management the economy and the people of the country are somehow better off as a whole is not supported.
Once upon a time there were Republicans who would argue effectively using evidence. Nowadays, unfortunately, we cannot expect much intellectual honesty from a political party primarily made up of members who believe, and leaders who refuse to deny, that the Earth is 6000 years old.
Brian Dennis
Professor of Statistics
University of Idaho
--------------------------------------------------------
The data:
YEAR UNEMPLOYMENT GDPGROWTH INFLATION SURPLUS PARTY
1960 5.5 2.5 1.4 0.1 R
1961 6.7 2.3 0.7 -0.6 R
1962 5.5 6.1 1.3 -1.3 D
1963 5.7 4.4 1.6 -0.8 D
1964 5.2 5.8 1.0 -0.9 D
1965 4.5 6.4 1.9 -0.2 D
1966 3.8 6.5 3.5 -0.5 D
1967 3.8 2.5 3.0 -1.1 D
1968 3.6 4.8 4.7 -2.9 D
1969 3.5 3.1 6.2 0.3 D
1970 4.9 0.2 5.6 -0.3 R
1971 5.9 3.4 3.3 -2.1 R
1972 5.6 5.3 3.4 -2.0 R
1973 4.9 5.8 8.7 -1.1 R
1974 5.6 -0.5 12.3 -0.4 R
1975 8.5 -0.2 6.9 -3.4 R
1976 7.7 5.3 4.9 -4.2 R
1977 7.1 4.6 6.7 -2.7 R
1978 6.1 5.6 9.0 -2.7 D
1979 5.8 3.2 13.3 -1.6 D
1980 7.1 -0.2 12.5 -2.7 D
1981 7.6 2.5 8.9 -2.6 D
1982 9.7 -1.9 3.8 -4.0 R
1983 9.6 4.5 3.8 -6.0 R
1984 7.5 7.2 3.9 -4.8 R
1985 7.2 4.1 3.8 -5.1 R
1986 7.0 3.5 1.1 -5.0 R
1987 6.2 3.4 4.4 -3.2 R
1988 5.5 4.1 4.4 -3.1 R
1989 5.3 3.5 4.6 -2.8 R
1990 5.6 1.9 6.1 -3.9 R
1991 6.8 -0.2 3.1 -4.5 R
1992 7.5 3.3 2.9 -4.7 R
1993 6.9 2.7 2.7 -3.9 R
1994 6.1 4.0 2.7 -2.9 D
1995 5.6 2.5 2.5 -2.2 D
1996 5.4 3.7 3.3 -1.4 D
1997 4.9 4.5 1.7 -0.3 D
1998 4.5 4.2 1.6 0.8 D
1999 4.2 4.5 2.7 1.4 D
2000 4.0 3.7 3.4 2.4 D
2001 4.7 0.8 1.6 1.3 D
2002 5.8 1.6 2.4 -1.5 R
2003 6.0 2.5 1.9 -3.5 R
2004 5.5 3.6 3.3 -3.6 R
2005 5.1 3.1 3.4 -2.6 R
2006 4.6 2.7 2.5 -1.9 R
2007 4.6 2.1 4.1 -1.2 R
2008 5.8 0.4 0.1 -3.2 R
2009 9.3 -2.4 2.7 -9.9 R
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