Ms. Fiorina Is Wrong About Democrats and Growth - WSJ letter

(Did not read the original op-ed, but love this letter)

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Carly Fiorina (“Hillary Clinton Flunks Economics,” op-ed, Oct. 27) wants to give Hillary Clinton an F for claiming that, “The economy does better when you have a Democrat in the White House.” Our research is the source of that claim, and Mrs. Clinton is right. In a well-publicized and heavily scrutinized paper now awaiting publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, we show that GDP growth between 1947 and 2013 was 1.8 percentage points higher, on average, when a Democrat sat in the Oval Office than when a Republican did. By standard statistical tests, a gap that large is highly unlikely to have occurred simply by chance. Even more dramatically, we show that GDP growth increased every time a Democratic president replaced a Republican and decreased every time a Republican president replaced a Democrat.

Ms. Fiorina bemoans the weak state of the economy today, but the Bush-to-Obama transition is no exception to this rule. The economy is far healthier today than it was in January 2009.

Prof. Alan S. Blinder

Prof. Mark W. Watson

Princeton University

Princeton, N.J.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/ms-fiorina-is-wrong-about-democrats-and-growth-1446498563