Why does the US economy perform better under Democrats than Republicans?

This appeared in The Millennial Source

“Since Carter, no Democratic President has had a recession begin on their watch. At the same time, no Republican President — including the single term Presidents (George H.W. Bush and Trump) — has gotten through their time in the White House without a recession.”

Despite the widely held belief that Republicans are better at managing the economy than Democrats, the history of the United States economy tells a different story. In nearly every metric one might use to measure performance, Democratic presidents have presided over greater economic growth.

Strikingly, this is not even by a slight margin. According to a paper published in 2013 by Princeton economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, the performance gap is “startlingly large” — so much so that it “strains credulity, given how little influence over the economy most economists (or the Constitution, for that matter) assign to the President of the United States.”

The pair suggests that this is not due to time sensitive matters or partisan fiscal or monetary policy. Instead, they attribute this gap in large part to “benign oil shocks, superior TFP [total-factor productivity] performance, and more optimistic consumer expectations.”

In short, they chalk it up to one part “luck,” another part “self-fulfilling prophecy” — whereby consumers anticipate the economy will flourish under a Democratic leader…