The fastest, post-war year of growth was under President Ronald Reagan. Post-World War II, President Lyndon B. Johnson had the highest average, at 5.3% because he boosted growth with government spending on the Vietnam War and many social programs. In 1973, Nixon ended the gold standard entirely and the dollar’s value plummeted. Bush faced the 1990-1991 recession caused by the S&L crisis. However, between his rounds of tax cuts, rebate checks, and funding two international wars plus the war on terror, the debt-to-GDP ratio increased precipitously. These outliers are often caused by events outside of the president’s control. Percent-wise, FDR added the most Despite what many fiscal conservatives assert, he presided over a collection of fiscally expansive policies, from defense spending to greater social welfare programs, that tripled the national debt. First, what is important? Like his father, he took office immediately after a period of fantastic economic growth, so it would have been difficult to leave the White House with the economy in even better shape. FDR’s increases to the defense budget finally ended the Depression, but growth came at a cost. Although many historians state the post-war prosperity period lasted until the recession of 1973, the EPI clearly shows the economy began deteriorating in the late 1960s, as inflation and the federal deficit grew while GDP growth slowed.If we’re going to judge presidents solely on the difference between when they took office and when they stepped down, though, we need to see all of them to have some context. Combine that with a marked reduction in federal income taxes and it sounds like a recipe for disaster. In 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Moderate GDP growth and low unemployment, combined with a stable inflation rate, allow President Obama to leave an economic legacy to rival Reagan’s.You would probably have expected President Clinton to score high on this list. His 1965 Great Society program created Medicare, Medicaid, and public housing; this program also addressed crime, urban renewal, and conservation. If you ranked the presidents by the average EPI score during their term (instead of the change), Clinton actually scores higher than Reagan and Obama. And even if something is important enough to consider, how do you assign points?
Obama ended the Iraq War and wound down the war in Afghanistan, although U.S. presence remains. A method that reduces the impact of these extremes is the Let’s break down all eleven and see what contributed to how these leaders wound up with the scores they did.President Reagan gets an advantage in this particular ranking because the economy was doing so poorly to begin with when he took office; the EPI scored it at 76.4% in 1981. "U.S. State Department Office of the Historian. Still, he left the economy running at 88.3%, a fine C+ performance as far as the EPI is concerned. President Dwight D. Eisenhower ended the Korean War in 1953, creating the 1954 recession, but he boosted growth with the 1956 Federal Aid Highway Act. Instead, Reagan increased the budget by 2.5% annually.