So who's part of the 29%?

DadsDream said

How soon we forget...

PBS
Nixon Tries Price Controls
Excerpt from The Commanding Heights by Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw, 1997 ed., pp. 60-64

[Following the Kennedy-Johnson administration in the United States, there was a massive effort to manage the marketplace, in part by controlling wages.] This initiative was not the handiwork of left-wing liberals but of the administration of Richard Nixon, a moderately conservative Republican who was a critic of government intervention in the economy.

READ MORE
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/ess_nixongold.html

Click to expand...

Let me amend my prior statement to reflect what I really meant. (How's that for a lawyer trick.) What I really meant is that there isn't much a President can do to make the economy better. He can with some actions make it worse.

So, in the end, I guess a President can have some small effect on the economy, but overall, our economy is driven by market forces, which is how it should be.

By the way, the conclusion to the article you link seems to suggest that Nixon's efforts lead to serious issues in the oil industry, which likely lead to some of the problems we had under Carter. Specifically, the price controls Nixon placed on domestic oil lead us to dependence on foreign oil and dependence on foreign oil lead to the gas crisis and spiraling inflation. Which also lead to the problems in Iran then and problems in the middle east now. So, in the end, it's not all Bush's fault, it's all Nixon's fault. :hihi: