Appreciate the answers and I’m sorry for some poor wording there, I was just looking at Presidents as a “if they can’t affect it, who could?”... you could say Congressional trends matter more, but the two are tied together, so looking at Presidents was just a shortcut.
I guess as much as anything I’m saying if we back out to look at the full economy, in something like this chart (real GDP growth by year) or this chart (real GDP per capita), there’s no indication what economic policies were in place at a given time. There’s growth and downturns in cycles that have little to do with who’s in power or their positions.
The only time you see large departures from the trends are when one or more industries failed. (great depression, WWII, S&L, Tech Bust, whatever you want to call 2008, etc). We could argue whether those were a result of policies or not, but I don’t think you could say that over regulation was the problem in any of those.
So let’s say an economically conservative approach makes sense to me logically, but I’d like some proof. Where do I look?