Democrats are Better Stewards of the Economy

In my previous posts, I have argued that democrats have simply been better stewards of the economy in the past, particularly in the last 60 years.

Tax-and-spend Liberal My Ass

Politics of the Federal Minimum Wage

Democrats Have Kept Unemployment Low

Democrats care about poor people

Truth About Economic Performance of Political Parties

In this post, I will discuss a recent graphic that further consolidates the view that the US economy has performed better under democratic presidents than republican ones. As I have noted before, there are many factors that affect the performance of the US economy aside from who is in the White House. Those factors notwithstanding, the whole narrative of a good economy under democratic administrations had been consistently true.

Tommy McCall provided a stark graphic at The New York Times called Bulls, Bears, Donkeys and Elephants. In there, he compares the performance of the stock market (S&P 90 * S&P 500) during Democratic and Republican administrations since 1929. Since Herbert Hoover was a real downer for the Republicans, McCall generously provides data including and excluding Hoover. So, how did the S&P fare under Democratic and Republican administrations? I will let you be the judge.

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Slow Acroread Startup in OpenSuSe 11.0

It takes more than 30 seconds for acroread to load on my Opensuse machine the first time and the startup time gets shorter in subsequent attempts. Why? This is not the first time I have come across this problem of slow application startups in OpenSuse. Apparently a lot of people had encountered this problem and they found a simple solution - uninstalling the version of acroread that comes with OpenSuse and installing one from Adobe site yourself. Fortunately, that prescription seems to have solved the problem. My acroread startup time is a few seconds now. Why does a very good Linux distribution like OpenSuse with its wide support and following make so many of these mistakes?!?! Over the years, I have seen Suse/OpenSuse sending buggy distributions that make you wonder if they do much testing before releasing their distro. Here are a few bugs I have come across: The extremely slow startup of Openoffice in OpenSuse 10.0 was one of the reasons I switched to Fedora Core for a while...

The Pervasive Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux Analogy

I'm sure everyone has seen the Mac vs. PC ads on TV where the Mac appears to be confident while th PC is in denial about its deficiencies. Missing from that picture is Linux which is robust, but seeks no attention because it has no commercial ambitions. This Mac vs. PC vs. Linux model can serve as a analogy for many things/phenomena. I would like to make a list of those analogies here. For example, The New York Times recently characterized Hillary as a PC and Obama as a mac on the basis of the design of their websites. The analogy would also work if you think of Hillary as the status quo much like Windows, and Obama as the new thing with great promise, cachet and appeal like the newly reborn mac. It is not obvious who would play the role of Linux, but my choice would be Ron Paul. He has some bold and independent ideas along with a very loyal following even though he has no chance of winning. PC Mac Linux Candidate Hillary Clinton Barack Obama Ron Paul States Northeast West Co...

Tax-and-spend Liberal My Ass

This is a continuation of my earlier posts on economic performance of democratic and republican administrations. My earlier posts include: Politics of the Federal Minimum Wage Democrats Have Kept Unemployment Low Democrats care about poor people Truth About Economic Performance of Political Parties I like to think I have shed light on some facts and debunked some conventional wisdom. In this post, I will attempt to examine the tax-and-spend liberal label put on democrats. Republicans often try to label democrats as tax-and-spend liberals who are soft on national security. While the latter point is based on anecdotal evidence, the earlier is amenable to empirical examination. So, I set out to prove or disprove the notion that democrats often tax and spend in a way that does not yield economic growth. The implication of tax-and-spend liberal is one that puts excessive tax burden on its population and finds inefficient (think socialistic) ways of spending that tax reven...

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