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Credit: ThinkProgress

When President Obama on Tuesday declared that decades of Republican trickle-down economics "never worked," conservatives were predictably apoplectic.

But for all of their protests of "class warfare", "socialism" and worse, Obama was being kind to the Republican ideologues. After all, as the historical record shows, from economic growth and job creation to stock market performance and just about every other indicator of the health of American capitalism, the modern U.S. economy has almost always done better under Democratic presidents. Despite GOP mythology to the contrary, America generally gained more jobs and grew faster when taxes were higher (even much higher) and income inequality lower. And while the U.S. recovery from the Bush recession remains painfully slow, most economists - including the nonpartisan CBO and some of John McCain's own 2008 advisers - believe President Obama saved it from the abyss.

(Click a link below for the details on each.)

• Job Creation and Economic Growth
• The Stock Market
• Income Inequality
• National Debt
• The Bush Recession and the Obama Recovery

Job Creation and Economic Growth

To be sure, George W. Bush provided the perfect bookend to era of modern Republican economic management ushered by Herbert Hoover. The verdict on President Bush's reign of ruin was pronounced even before Barack Obama took the oath of office. Just days after the Washington Post documented that George W. Bush presided over the worst eight-year economic performance in the modern American presidency, the New York Times on January 24, 2009 featured an analysis ("Economic Setbacks That Define the Bush Years") comparing presidential performance going back to Eisenhower. As the Times showed, George W. Bush, the first MBA president, was a historic failure when it came to expanding GDP, producing jobs and fueling stock market growth.

On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, "Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record." (The Journal's interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn't merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton's tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush's job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:

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Over at Digby's place, David Atkins points out that these financial Masters of the Universe don't really know what they're doing, and are instead lurching from one strategy to another:

So in the midst of this giant selloff, where did the masters of the universe decide to put their money? Why, treasuries, of course:

Treasury bond yields are plunging to levels seen in the 1950s on concern the two-year recovery in the world’s largest economy is stalling.

Yields on benchmark 10-year U.S. notes are about 4.3 percentage points below the average over the past 49 years and almost where they were when President Dwight D. Eisenhower began his administration in 1953. The yield, which dropped to 2.40 percent today in New York, reached a record low of 2.04 percent in December 2008 during the global financial crisis...

“It’s signaling a flight to safety,” said Ethan Harris, head of developed-markets economic research at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York, on Bloomberg Television’s “Surveillance Midday” with Tom Keene. “Even with the Treasury market as a weakened safe-haven market, it still gets the safe haven money.”

The S&P 500 fell 4.8 percent, dropping more than 10 percent drop from its April 29 peak. The MSCI All-Country World Index slid 4.3 percent. Oil plunged 6.2 percent to $86.27 a barrel as all 24 commodities tracked by the S&P GSCI Index declined. Gold futures retreated from a record.

Yes, the same treasuries that were supposed to be in horrible trouble because the ratings agencies said America was too far in debt to keep the yield on our treasuries at healthy levels. The same treasuries concern that led to the austerity bill that led to the market drop that led everyone to run to the only safe place left: treasuries. Brilliant.

And tomorrow [today] there's a jobs report coming out, which will no doubt be worse than expected and lead to even more nonsensical selloffs, considering the strong bottom lines of the American companies that have made such a killing precisely by keeping that unemployment rate at high levels.

If this is all the work of genius master manipulators, someone will have to explain the evil scheme. What it really looks like is a bunch of greedy fools who can't see past next quarter's profit statement and next April's tax return, and end up swerving all over the political and economic road like the world's most shortsighted driver. Meanwhile, all the passengers get sick in the back wondering what the next swerve is going to be.

The only real question is: when do we take their hands off the wheel?

On Friday, the New York Times provided a jaw-dropping analysis of the dismal state of the economy under George W. Bush. Just days after the Washington Post documented that Bush presided over the worst eight-year economic performance in the modern American presidency, the Times charted his historic failure in expanding GDP, producing jobs and fueling stock market growth. As it turns out, Bush is just the latest Republican to confirm the maxim that Wall Street and the economy overall almost always do better under Democratic presidents.

As the Times revealed (article here, charts here), the only bright spot for the first MBA president's economic mismanagement was the low inflation rate during his tenure:

During his administration, the country grew at the slowest overall pace of any recent president, whether measured in gross domestic product or employment. The last president to preside while the stock market did worse was Herbert Hoover...

...President Bush's administration was marked by a recession that began two months after he took office and another downturn in his final year of office. In the end, the economy during his term added enough jobs to employ only 14 percent of the added number of working-age Americans, the lowest proportion of any postwar administration. Employment grew at a compound annual rate of only 0.3 percent, half the 0.6 percent rate that his father had recorded in what had previously been the worst post-World War II performance.

For the investor class so fond of perpetuating the myth of Republicans' superior economic stewardship, the collapse of the stock marketing during the Bush recession must be particularly galling. The Standard & Poor's 500 spiraled down at annual rate of 5.6% during Bush's time in the Oval Office, a disaster even worse than Richard Nixon's abysmal 4.0% yearly decline. (Only Herbert Hoover's cataclysmic 31% plunge makes Bush look good in comparison.)

As it turns out, as the New York Times also showed in October, the Democratic Party "has been better for American pocketbooks and capitalism as a whole."

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