Intention

My motivations were to cause people to jump to a conclusion while presenting with some sort of correlation.

Specifically, I chose to look at the effect that a particular party has on the economy. To show this, I took GDP growth and mapped it out to recent presidents, taking into account the party they represented. The results would appear to suggest that a certain party has a "healthier" effect on economic growth...

Product

Basically I looked at GDP growth rate per year and calculated the average over the last 10 presidential terms (which, not surprisingly to me, was evenly split between Democratic and Republican Presidents). I then made a graph correlating the two. Here are the details:

Context

I'm pretty sure there's many sources that have done similar correlations. Some probably more thorough than mine. Still, with so much information being thrown around, I wanted to add a little piece to the puzzle. Obviously, GDP growth is just one measure of a nation's economy, and it doesn't tell us the whole story. And of course, correlation does not prove causation. But, isn't the point of this assignment to lie?

Process

I thought about what I wanted to do. I thought long and hard. Mostly because I didn't really know where to go with this project. This is the kind of project I would've loved to dedicate weeks to create some sort of larger thing. But that's not what happened. So I googled GDP in the US for the past few years and calculated the average over a President's term. Then I made a graph about it.

Reflection

I kind of had the impression that GDP would improve more during Republican years, as they tend to be more fiscally liberal. That being said, I wish I had more time to create a larger project in which we take multiple variables and correlate them to presidential terms.

Attribution

http://www.multpl.com/us-gdp-growth-rate/table/by-year