Over at Angry Bear, my colleague Mike Kimel wrote a book called "Presimetrics". It measures the economy in various ways related to the terms of presidents (and their parties). Kimel concluded that Democratic presidents show the best broad-based economic growth and the best job creation.
Now, that fits because Democrats--albeit usually in weak form and often co-opted by the financial wealth holders of the country--generally adopt policies that do have something to do with furthering broad based growth that benefits ordinary American, rather than just feathering the nests of the already rich. What kinds of policies? Well, anti-trust, pro-unionization, financial regulation, regulation of industrial pollution, environmental protection, "green" industries, unemployment compensation, progressive taxation, estate taxation, and the AMT (which undoes some of the accumulated preferences mostly enjoyed by the rich, from charitable deductions for value they never paid taxes on and so comprising a pure windfall, to huge mortgage interest deductions on their million dollar homes, though it still leaves them their preferential taxation on capital gains).
Others are beginning to catch on to Kimel's conclusions. See, e.g., this graph at The Far Left Side (constrasting the last 11 Presidents by party and their impact on the economy for bad or good--Republicans are almost uniformly bad, with their corporatist policies intended to benefit the rich at the cost of productivity sharing with the workers who make it possible). You might want to read the site, as well as Kimel's book (available through Angry Bear).
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