Daryl has been telling us how much better the economy does under Democrats than Republicans. In an effort to be as fair as possible I took the liberty of checking on the closing price of the Dow 30 Industrials for the first 6 years Bush was in office but had a Republican majority in Congress. Then in 2006 there was an election where the Democrats took over both houses of Congress. Here’s the daily closing Dow value for those 2 periods. Hmmm. I wonder what this means?
Let’s see, September 11th, 2001 happened in the very first part of Bush’s term. I wonder what that other stuff means?
That’s one data point. It’s very hard to show correlation with one event. Contrast that with the 50+ years of data used in the study I keep trotting out.
And if you like that argument that lagging the performance 18 months to 2 years is the right way to view the Democrat-favoring study that I cited, then you should apply that shift here. You can’t have it both ways.
Comment by Daryl — Wednesday October 29, 2008 @ 11:47 am
Thank you Daryl for finally pointing out what I’ve been saying. Using one factor is not a “scientific” method of determining cause/effect. Now maybe you’ll stop trotting out your study that does exactly that.
Comment by Don — Wednesday October 29, 2008 @ 1:41 pm
Now you’re misquoting me. I didn’t say “one factor”, I said “one event”.
With regression analysis and other modern statistical techniques it’s easy to isolate effects from different variables. It’s no challenge to show the effect of one variable (“factor”) even when it is mixed in with others. But of course you can’t do that based on a single event (single data point).
The study I quoted did isolate Presidential Party from Congressional Party. The variable “Presidential Party” had the largest single effect on the results based on 50 years of data, not a single event.
Comment by Daryl — Wednesday October 29, 2008 @ 4:12 pm
A lot of mumbo jumbo to say what I just said. There are lots of things that affect the economy. The party of the president is not a very large one.
Comment by Don — Wednesday October 29, 2008 @ 8:49 pm