Best and Worst Presidents Relative to Debt Growth

So much talk about the Debt lately is making my head spin and my previous posts have just created more questions.  I decided to look at the COMPOUND ANNUAL GROWTH of the National Debt under each President to see how they did.  This approach does not "punish" a President for what they inherited, but what happened after they took office.  I used Presidential terms from the inauguration year to their last full year and I put Kennedy/Johnson together as a term and likewise for Nixon/Ford.  I also generated numbers for Obama with only 2 years completed and his third year estimated, but I will present these only in comparison to the other's results.

I also evaluated each President on the GDP Growth as well as the components of Debt: Receipts (including Individual and Corporate Taxes), Outlays, Deficit, and Supplemental.  As for "good" or "bad" evaluations, I am assuming higher Receipts is good and lower Outlays are good which lowers the deficit and the debt.  I recognize that certain political philosophies may not support these being "good".

The President with the highest growth rate on Debt was Ronald Reagan, yes Reagan!  He also had the highest growth rate in Supplemental spending.  Obama would have come in second to Reagan if we used his 2+ year performance.  Below is Reagan's Debt growth rate of 15.1% followed by his Supplemental growth of 46.6%



The highest growth rate of yearly deficits occurred under Bush 2 at 63.8%.  The Obama growth over the 2+ years is 6.3%.  Below is the Bush 2 graph for Deficits.

To summarize all this data, I created a table of all the contributors to Debt: Receipts, Outlays, Deficit, Supplemental Spending, Debt and GDP.  Then identified the 2 highest growth rates and the 2 lowest growth rates and assigned a point each time a President's term appeared.  Again, I used high Receipt growth and low Outlay growth as "good" and of course the converse as "bad".

The two highest point totals for "Best Debt Presidents" are: Clinton and Carter, each with 5 points.  The next highest had 2 points.

The two highest point totals for "Worst Debt Presidents" are: Bush 1 with 5 points; Bush 2 and Nixon/Ford each had 4 points.  The next highest had 2 points.   This suggests that the Republicans are "worse" for our Debt while Democrats are "good" for our Debt.  Isn't that a switch??

To note: Clinton and Carter both had higher GDP growth rates than Bush 1 or Bush 2 (5.8%, 11.2%, 4.8%, 5.4% respectively.  I thought Republicans were "good" for the economy??

  The entire table follows, including the Obama number for his 2+ years for compaison.  Had Obama's term been included, there would be NO Change in the "Best" Presidents, but Obama would have replaced Bush 2 in "Worst" Presidents with all of them getting 4 points.

A few more comments on the internals:

• Carter and Clinton had the highest growth rates on Individual Income Taxes (16.1% and 10.4%) while the highest growth in Corporate Income Tax was during Bush 2 and Reagan (16.5% and 9.2%).  I would have expected all these to occur during the strongest ecomonies, or highest GDP growth but they did not.  Who is business friendly again??  Who is looking out for the average american again??
• Payroll tax (Social Security and Medicare) grew 3.0% faster than Individual Income Tax growth until 1990 when the Payroll Tax Rate shrank 3.8% faster.  There have not been any Payroll tax increases since 1990.  (Remember payroll taxes have been decreased recently while our trust funds are going bankrupt)
• Only Clinton and Carter had Receipt growth higher than GDP growth by 1.3%. (Higher Taxes??)  All other Presidents had Receipt growth LOWER than GDP growth.  Shouldn't the government benefit from a good economy?
• Government spending grew on average (per 8 year term) by 6.8% for Republicans and 5.1% for Democrats.  I thought Democrats were the ones who grew the government??

What this is beginning to tell me is that political ideology may get them votes, but the results they promise (or degraded to the other) is not supported by the facts and data.  Someone tell me if you hear or see any media outlets telling you this kind of information!!  Rather than driving a wedge between the Parties with rhetoric, maybe, with data, we could see they have much more in common in practice.