Update: Best and Worst Presidents Relative to Debt Growth

I have been away from my blog for several months as I have just moved west!  But now that I am settled and Obama published the 2013 Budget, I thought I might update my analysis knowing that the 2011 Actuals would be published and available.  As you might expect, the 2011 Actuals do reflect the recession but surprisingly, the government receipts came in 7%  HIGHER than forecasted and government outlays came in about 7% LOWER than forecasted for 2011.

Given these 2011 results, I decided to revisit my August 17, 2011 post "Best and Worst Presidents Relative to Debt Growth" http://datainthenews.blogspot.com/2011/08/best-and-worst-presidents-relative-to.html.  Now that Obama has 3 years of actuals under his term, I decided to include him with the other presidential terms I had evaluated in the August 17th blog.  Using all the same criteria, the results and conclusions did not change, much to my surprise.  The summary table of these comparisons follows:





As before, I  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".  I also evaluated  Receipts, Outlays and Debt growth relative to GDP growth.  In all these categories, I then awarded a point each time a Presidential Term appeared in the highest two or lowest two growth rates in all these different categories.

The two Presidential terms with the highest point counts for "Best" were Clinton with 7 and Carter with 6 (Obama had 5).  The Terms with the highest point counts for "Worst" are Bush 1 with 6 and Nixon with 5 (Obama had 3).

In spite of the deficits and debt being at record levels during this recession, the Debt Growth leader is still Reagan at 15.1%.