There are lots of variables that affect economic growth other than who the president is. That article however is so full of misleading bullshit I could spend a week pointing it all out. Not even going to start.

I'll just explain it as simply as possible. Both parties believe in redistribution of wealth. The Democrats believe in redistributing wealth downwards, the GOP believe in redistributing it upwards. Downward redistribution puts a bigger share of the national income in the hands of people who will go out and spend it. This creates new demand in the economy for goods and services which creates economic growth to supply that demand. Seventy percent of the US economy is consumer spending! Fund those spenders with extra income and you get rapid economic growth and, this bit is crucial, broadly shared prosperity! You need to make sure that the top earners still make significantly more money than low and middle income earners though. They need to have that incentive to keep on investing in new businesses. Luckily the top earners not making a big enough share of the economic pie has never been a problem in America!

Redistributing wealth upwards doesn't work nearly as well. You're giving a bigger slice of the national income pie to people who don't put that money back into the real economy, they put it into stocks and bonds and invest it because they already earn far more than they spend. All you're doing with upward redistribution is taking more money out of the real economy. Economic growth under Republican presidents happens despite their economic policies, not because of it.

There is almost a century of really good detailed economic data to back all this up. And note I'm not talking about taxes, I'm talking exclusively about income here. The national income pie and the percentage of that that goes to labour and the percentage that goes to capital (the people who own everything).

There are lots of little examples of stuff that individual presidents do but probably the single best example to show how this all works is the multi decade effort from conservatives to destroy the power of unions to bargain for a bigger share of the national income pie for their members. This effort started the minute after FDR passed a load of pro-union legislation back in the 1930s but really got going under Reagan and a compliant Supreme Court. Back in the fifties over a third of private sector workers were union members and the people who weren't union members could always tell their bosses that if they didn't get comparable wages and conditions to union businesses they'd unionise too. This gave American workers a lot of power. Then the conservatives got busy busting unions and now the number of people in unions is about five percent. Their power is almost nothing compared to seventy years ago when of course America had the fastest economic growth and broadly shared prosperity in its history. Here's how this looks in a graph:







And even this graph is misleading. Between 1979 and 2020 income for the middle 20% of American earners went up about sixteen percent. Income for the top 0.1%, the people who own everything, went up over six hundred percent. This is deliberate and the result of decades of rigging the economy in favour of the people who own everything. So when Democratic presidents get in and do what they can to reverse this it creates a boost to growth and employment growth.

Here's a brief rundown on the conservative war on unions over the years:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/janus...b09c872baea8c9



There's endless more documentation of this and the whole general thrust of both parties when it comes to the economy, growth, employment, share of national income and so on.