Are you financially better off when the president is a Republican or Democrat?

According to a new book, Bulls, Bears and the Ballot Box: How the Performance of Our Presidents Has Impacted Your Wallet, the answer is not what is widely believed.

In an analysis spanning 80 years and 13 presidents—from Herbert Hoover to George W. Bush—authors Lew Goldfarb and Bob Deitrick show, in their words,

the GOP theory of Republican economic dominance is no more than a myth. Period.

Republicans pride themselves of being the champions of small business owners. But it’s helpful to clarify what actually is their definition of a small business.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) released a report that shows only 2.5 percent of small business owners would be affected by allowing the Bush tax cuts to expire on the wealthiest taxpayers (top two marginal tax rates).

The media is more likely to define a presidential administration as a “job killer” if it’s Democratic, according to an independent study released this week, and in 91.6 percent of the stories alleging that a government policy was a “job killer,” the news media failed to cite any evidence for this claim.

In a televised panel discussion yesterday, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka handily put Mitt Romney’s economic polices into perspective: stale and failed.

Countering comments by Romney economic adviser Vin Weber that corporate taxes need to be lowered and deregulation pushed forward, Trumka noted that George W. Bush followed that same prescription with the result that after his eight years as president,

there were fewer jobs in America when he left office then when he came into office. If those were such a great prescription, why did they almost destroy the economy?

Indiana’s Gov. Mitch Daniels, who gave the Republican response to President Obama’s State of the Union address last night, represents all too well the sad decline of the national Republican Party. As suggested by the Twitter hashtag #MitchFail, Daniels was an improbably bad choice to represent a party already facing questions about its commitment to the 99 percent. (Feel free to post a message to Daniels at his Facebook page: www.facebook.com/mymanmitchfans .)

The public workers and students in Wisconsin wore out a lot of shoe leather in their months of protest against the conservatives’ attacks on working people. Now they have a bronze shoe to honor their efforts.