Political Party Shenanigans

Welcome back to the blog!

Political parties are groups of people who share the same political opinions based on their economic and social values. The largest known political parties are the Democratic and Republican party, but there are also third parties such as the Green Party. 

Politics today have become incredibly polarized which has caused massive arguments between Democrats and Republicans concerning which is the better party. I'm going to attempt to answer which political party is better at maintaining a successful economy. 

The graphs I'll be showing are taken from a website called http://presidentialdata.org/. This website has a ton of information on economic management from past presidents collected by Jere Glover, who has worked with the Senate and House. These graphs represent economic data comparisons between republican (red) and democratic (blue) presidents since 1985. 

Now, there are a lot of things to take in when we see these graphs, so we'll go through each one.

 The first graph represents job growth under different presidents. Your eye might go to president Ford's bar right away, as it is the tallest, but also because he had 3,195,000 average job growth per year, but when we see that compared to other Republicans, it presents itself as an outlier. We see that Democrats actually have higher average job growths compared to Republican presidents. When we add up all the democratic averages we get a total of 11,222,000 average job growth compared to 7,886,000 average job growth, a 3,336,000 difference. This shows us that Democrats in office have had more overall job growth than Republican presidents.

The second graph shows the average gross domestic product (GDP) percentage per year. GDP is the total value of goods produced or services provided in a country over the span of a year. Democrats have an average GDP growth of 3.75% compared to Republican's 2.6 %, that's a difference of 1.15%. So what this shows us is that democratic presidents generally have higher GDP growth compared to Republicans.

The third graph has to do with the on-budget deficit which basically means how much debt the government is in. Democrats had $6,273.2 billion in debt while Republicans had $7,807.2 billion This means since 1962 Democrats in office have had less debt compared to Republicans. 

When answering the question of which party is best suited to maintain a successful economy, based on the graphs I've analyzed, I would say that Democrats have won. Despite this, I would like to say that the economy has many moving parts and it's not always because of the party of the president that the economy shifts one way or another. As we see with Ford, although I did classify him as an outlier, he outranked the Democratic presidents for job growth.

Did you know that President Donald Trump also agrees that Democrats do a better job running the economy? Maybe he could learn a thing or two? That's not a jab at him just a suggestion!

Thanks for reading!