A new side-by-side statistical comparison of the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama shows a series of devastating results for the current White House tenant.
The study suggests that Bush was more successful in 14 of the 16 categories chosen by the conservative
Alabama Policy Institute (API).
For instance the number of Americans on food stamps was 19.2 million under the 43rd president, but now stands at 39.5 million, the one-page chart shows. The increase in the national debt was 28.6 percent under Bush and 50.6 percent under Obama.
Other figures show the three-year average cost for a family’s health insurance was a little over $8,000 under Bush, but a little over $14,000 now.
Perhaps the most startling graphics are the gross national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product — 61.6 percent under Bush, but 98.7 percent under Obama — and total job creation which was plus 440,000 in the Bush years but minus 2,760,000 under Obama, according to the Institute’s figures.
The chart also showed the average length of unemployment had gone up from 5.3 weeks in the Bush years to 9.6 weeks now, while average per capita income had gone down by nearly $5,000 from $31,644 to $26,727.
"It was important to API that we provide an apples-to-apples comparison," the institute’s policy director and general counsel, Cameron Smith said.
"Since President Obama's first term is not over, we did not pair statistics of his incomplete term with those of President Bush's full term. If data was only available for the first three years of Mr. Obama's administration for a particular statistic, we compared that figure to the same information from the first three years of the Bush administration."
Smith said an informed electorate is a powerful force and that is why his group intended to continue to put out easy-to-understand graphics on issues that matter most.
The two items that Obama came out ahead of Bush on were the number of new government regulations, which AMI said stood at 11,017 under the current president and 13,615 under his predecessor, and in the change in the S&P 500, up 74.3 percent under Obama, but down 32.6 percent under Bush.
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