Coolidge may have been popular at the time, but I'm going on a historical assessment of the Presidents. Coolidge was a ticking time-bomb of a President who fostered calamities that would explode after the end of his Presidency. The speculative boom of the 1920s has obvious parallels to the one of recent years -- except that it was more in securities than in real estate. Coolidge did nothing to mute a stock market bubble that began when he was President. Hoover had been President for only six months at the time of the 1929 Stock Market Crash.
The president is not in control of the business cycle. The Federal Reserve set the conditions up for a bust. It was the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations that then proceeded to turn an isolated crash into the Great Depression. Had Harding-Coolidge policy been adhered to, there would have been no Great Depression.Maybe not the President, but certainly the political culture. During the 1920s, productivity rose faster than wages. Such itself creates increasing economic inequality, and in the end the super-rich who get the gains can't spend enough to prevent the decline of the economy. Much the same happened in this decade; in the 1920s the cause of productivity outstripping wages was the electrification of factories; in this decade it was the use of computers that made business able to do more work with fewer employees. As a symptom of the trend the Gini coefficient (a measure of economic inequality) for income in the US rose to the high 40s, the highest that it had been since... 1929!
Wait, the Germans were the ones who got FDR?[/quote]
Take a look at any US dime minted since 1946 for a clue. You know exactly who I mean by the Antichrist -- and he barely got a chance to wield power, and he milked that chance to establish one of the most vicious despotisms in human history. Hitler's Nazi Party was bankrupt, and his political support was beginning to shrink when some fools chose to let him get power.
I concede that Lincoln and Hitler had one thing in common -- death at age 56 by a gunshot wound to the head from a madman at or near the end of the war for which he is best known.
TR and Eisenhower as "peacetime" presidents? Please, you clearly haven't gotten a clue.
(Coolidge was still better than either of them, by the way)
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Really?Theodore Roosevelt is consistently considered one of our greatest Presidents, Eisenhower is well above average in all but one scholarly poll taken two years after he left the Presidency, and Coolidge is on the borderline of the worst.