After Bill Clintons words at the DNC I wanted to look into the actual jobs creation record by party. I work a day job and have other responsibilities so it took a while. Politifact checked up on him using absolute non-government job creation. The figure from 1961 is fairly impressive. Democrats created 42.3 million jobs compared to Republicans 23.9. But as I looked at this figure I had questi ons. What would a longer time frame show? Did they strategically select that time frame because it would look good? What about percentage changes? Absolute numbers are great but is it a fair ranking? This lead to the question of what is the long term average expected rate of change for employment (all jobs) by administration? WWW.BLS.GOV has this information for free. The data goes all the way back to the depression era but I chose to go to 1948 for simple and noble reason that the format comes in a format that requires “transposing and stacking” into excel. Transposing is a quick couple clicks in excel. Stacking is done year by year….. by year…… by year. Surely 64 years is a more significant statistical sample. Working with percentages and averages should be more fair. Republicans have held the oval office for much longer than Democrats.
Findings: At a total of 776 months Republicans held the presidency for almost twice as many months as Democrats. Republicans held the office for 492 months to the Democrats 284 months. Average percent monthly change for Republicans is .0894. Democrats .157. Then I thought I could group the data together by party administration and look at a cumulative total. Results: It looks like Democrats have a better jobs creation record than Republicans. That is an impressive feat, creating SIGNIFICANTLY more jobs in SIGNIFICANTLY less time