I heard someone say today that the last time that the Rs controlled the Presidency and both houses was 1928, i.e. just before Great Depression. Further, that every time thereafter that the Rs had the Presidency and one house of Congress, there was a recession.
Can someone who is knowledgeable please either answer or direct me to where I could derive the answer to these statements?
JohnW77707
I’ve not heard that, but what I have heard is that any time we get a new President, the US economy goes into recession. Which means the current economic problems aren’t Bush’s fault, as Gore would have faced the same thing.
This is a statement with so few data points as to be logically meaningless. The only stretches of Republican presidency since 1932 have been Eisenhower, Nixon/Ford, Reagan/Bush 41, and Bush 43. For the first two years of Eisenhower’s administration, Republicans controlled both houses of Congress by paper-thin majorities. A brief recession did ensue. During the Nixon/Ford era, Republicans never controlled either house. For the first six years of Reagan’s administration, Republicans controlled the Senate. There was a recession during this period, in 1981-82. But without getting into a GD here, just about any economist in the universe would say that this was absolutely necessary to choke off the horrendous inflation left over the Nixon/Ford/Carter era. Voters were so upset about it that they punished Reagan with a 49-state victory.
The next instance of joint Republican control was the first four months of 2001, and now today. We await developments.
Also, it’s not true that we have a recession when a new president takes office. We certainly didn’t under Clinton.
Bush inherited the recession which must also be addressed. The market bubbles were popping the last 9 months of the Clinton presidency.
I’m not sure of the congress makeup but in '58 there was a recession or pullback,whatever it was called (remember an uncle bitching about it after being laid off from his building trades job)
Nixon’s 6 mo.price freezes that lasted abt.2 yrs,71/73,must have had some kind of employment effect,I know when the last one was lifted it created some havoc,being in business at the time and having yesterday’s costs printed on the menu,and having to redo it every couple mos.
Can’t remember if anybody was calling it a recession,but it was a confusing time for producers,as well as consumers.
Reagan’s has been documented,as well as Bush 1s.
From my experience every republican pres.has run into some kind of economy pitfall.
This latest one,tho is the longest I’ve ever seen (I go back to Ike in republican history)
Again,I don’t know how this correlates to congress makeup.
I’m not an economist, but I’d venture to say that no president or congress had any great direct effect on the economy other than perhaps FDR. The economy’s performance is cyclical based on market forces and while consumer confidence and such might get a nudge based on who’s elected, the economy as a whole does what it does based on whether the big money bastards feel like investing in business or not (or which businesses). And we really pay entirely too much attention the Wall Street Chicken Little Casino…
Again, trying as hard as possible to limit it to facts, is there any dispute about JKLANN’s answer – there aren’t many data points, but the answer to the question is technically “yes”?
JohnW77707
At the very least least the Clinton Bubble burst in the last quarter of his admin.
I just noticed that my post wasn’t quite consistent–the OP asks about the GOP controlling one house of Congress, and by that definition the entire Bush 43 presidency qualifies, since Republicans have controlled the House. And, obviously, there has been a recession during this period. (Although it MAY have begun during the tail end of the previous administration–I’m not sure if the Department of Commerce still attempts to date recessions to the nearest month.)
So that’s a third data point. Make of it what you will.
NBER has a table showing the economic cycles in the US dating back to 1854. Now if someone can find a table of which party controlled each branch of legislature and when, it should be easy to draw up a scorecard. IMHO, Presidential terms should be counted as beginning in February, since the President isn’t sworn in until the final week of January. Not that it really matters, since it is difficult to correlate the causes of recessions to who held office at the time.
Extra credit, though, if anyone wants to calculate the average duration of recession by party.
For the sake of simplicity, I looked at the data from the reverse standpoint, that is, who was in power during the each recession since the depression. As has been mentioned, the data is a bit skewed since the Democratic Party has held leadership in the congress the majority of the time during this period. (As an aside, including the depression itself, the three recessions that immediately precede this period all featured a Rep president and both houses with Rep majorities.)
During this period, there have been 12 recessions. Seven of these have had a Republican in the White House, but only three of these have had at least one house of the congress led by Republicans, while four of them had both houses run by the opposition. By contrast, of the five recessions under Democrat presidents, 4 had both houses controlled by Dem’s. The other occurred when both houses were Republican. Also of note, there were only two Presidents who did not have any recessions while in office, and both had both houses controlled by their party at least part of that time. Both were Democrats.
It may seem significant that Dem’s controlled both houses during 2/3 of the recessions, but actually Dem’s controlled both houses about 2/3 of this time, so it really doesn’t mean much. In fact, if anything, it would seem to indicate that which party is in power has little or no effect on when recessions occur.
I’m sorry but the OP is just flimsy. Anyone who doesn’t live by the bumber stickers on their cars realizes that the economy and the politcal party in charge are totally unrelated.
Ecomonies and polical parties moves of their own devices. To try to reach some correlation between them would be akin to astrology.
So why does that mean that the OP is “flimsy”? He heard something and he wants to know if it’s true.
I didn’t realize that the idea of a recession was well-defined enough to do this sort of analysis; I always assumed it was a subjective term. Can someone briefly explain exactly what a recession is?
I have to point out that even if it were true, you could have the cause and effect reversed. In other words, Republicans didn’t get elected and then wreck the economy, they got elected because the other guys screwed it up first.
Certainly Reagan and Bush 43 had no opportunity to stop their recessions. In Reagan’s case, the recession was mainly the result of the shrinking money supply under Paul Volcker’s fed. And Bush 43’s recession was due to the double shock of the dot com bubble bursting, followed by a trillion dollars of capital going up on Sept 11, and the shock to consumer confidence and business investment that followed.
I can’t give you an exact definition, but I do know that you’re close when you say that it’s a subjective term. There’s no set rule as in X% of the population must be unemployed or the economy has to shrink by X% before it’s called a recession. What happens is that a group of economists get together, look over the economic data, and then vote on the matter. Probably not the most exact method of determining one, but unless I’m mistaken, that’s how it’s determined.
Completely false on the second count. Please see the site linked to above for the raw data. You can argue that the events of Sept 11 prolonged the recession, but Bush 43’s recession began March 2001, six months before Sept. The counter argument, of course, is that he was only president for 2 months at that point. But as has been pointed out previously, there is almost certainly no way to strongly correlate which party was in power with recessionary causes. You could select any unit of time you want between “party in power” and “start of recession”. I’d be willing to bet the results would be pretty much the same as I posted above, that is, no correlation better than the party in power 60% of the time is in power during 60% of recessions.
From http://www.moneychimp.com/glossary/recession.htm
Recession
Two consecutive quarters of declining GDP.
An alternate definition is any economic downturn significant enough to be declared a recession by the National Bureau of Economic Research, based on employment data and other indicators; see the NBER’s website, www.nber.org.
From http://www.nber.org/cycles/recessions.html
Q:The financial press often states the definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP. How does that relate to the NBER’s recession dating procedure?
A: Most of the recessions identified by our procedures do consist of two or more quarters of declining real GDP, but not all of them. According to current data for 2001, the present recession falls into the general pattern, with three consecutive quarters of decline. Our procedure differs from the two-quarter rule in a number of ways. First, we use monthly indicators to arrive at a monthly chronology. Second, we use indicators subject to much less frequent revision. Third, we consider the depth of the decline in economic activity. Recall that our definition includes the phrase, “a significant decline in activity.”