Now, the boom during Clintons presidency was because of Reagan. The current recession is Clintons fault. The current mild upswing is because of Dubya.
Poor George H.W. Bush, he gets credit for nothing:(
The question: Is there any real way to determine which presidential policies did what to the economy? How much blame/credit does congress get?
Well, you’re on the right track. Who gets credit is more a matter of superstition and partisan ideology than anything justified by science.
Even if you think a certain president’s policies were really spiffy, proving a causal relationship between them and the economy’s performance is next to impossible.
I guess it’s easier to prove that a president sucks than that he’s good. Take W, for instance. By any rational standard, his handling of the nation’s economic woes has been sheerly incompetent.
But did Reagan really get the economy on track way back when? Or did Carter’s appointment of Paul Volker to FR chairman ultimately result in the containment of inflation well after his own term had ended?
Did Calvin Coolidge preside over a boomtime economy, or was he setting the nation up for disaster, for which Hoover took the blame because it was on his watch?
Did WWII really help end the Depression, or would things have turned around anyway?
You can argue this shit all day long.
the way I see it the question should be “Who gets the blame?”
The decline in the dollars value worldwide more than offsets any stock market gains and the huge deficit this administration has given us coupled with ignorant tax cuts have left our economy on the very verge of a meltdown.
Credit? Please. “Credit” in the form of our national debt is dangerously close to burying us.
Well, we still don’t know what inputs do what to the economy, for most inputs in a reliable way. You know the joke, you get 20 economists, you get 20 theories. Given that, how can you determine what policies were good or bad, except in extreme cases (say… our current administration?).
Also, a capitalist economy by it’s very nature is composed of many many players each doing their own thing. How much influence any particular president has is not as much as many believe. He’s just one particularly big player.
I think we can give G.H.W. Bush credit for two things. After the “no new taxes” campaign promise, he made a very prudent and responsible deal with the Democratic Congress to take the necessary steps to get us out of the '91-'92 recession. Therefore, he should get credit for starting the “Clinton boom”. He also gets credit for proving conclusively that a US politician interested in survival should never put responsible actions above political game playing.