Best and Worst Presidents for the Economy

After publishing my previous post titled "Best and Worst Presidents Relative to Debt Growth" (8/17/2011), my long held beliefs were rattled.  So I decided to dig a bit deeper into the Government Data on the economy, specifically the GDP.  In my investigation and analysis, I had noticed GDP numbers that I could not reconcile.  I finally found the problem when I got to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.  http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/SelectTable.asp?Popular=Y

 The bottom line is that two GDP numbers are used.  The GDP (sometimes "nominal"GDP) is the value of Goods and Services, priced using each year's (or quarter's) actual prices.  The Real GDP is calculated using a constant price for all years, essentially removing the effect of inflation.  When a percentage change is calculated on Real GDP, it reflects the real growth in economic output by removing "growth" due to price inflation.  Said another way, Real GDP is the actual volume of goods and services produced during any period.  A high GDP growth driven by high inflation would not necessarily be a job creating economy.  However, a high growth of Real GDP is more likely to create jobs since additional goods and services are being produced.

So I decided to look at the same Presidential Terms as were analyzed in my previous post, but this time with a focus on GDP compound growth both Real and Nominal.  As an example of the technique, below are two graphs for Reagan's Term on GDP Growth and Real GDP Growth (these graphs are described in my previous post).

The table below summarizes the results for all Presidential Terms.  Included is a column for the first 10 Quarters of each Presidential Term so that Obama's Term to Date results can also be included. 

As you can see, the lowest GDP and Real GDP growth rates occur on Republican Terms and the highest are during Democratic Terms.  This led me to calculate an average for all Democratic Terms and all Republican Terms.  (Each average has a single term President).  Again, the Democrats have done better in all categories when it come to Economic growth and, by inference from Real GDP, job growth as well.  All this data is really getting me to rethink my political affiliation!