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Pull Up the Tape

Why I made Pull Up the Tape

With the next elections in mind, I had some questions.

In every term, a lot goes up and down: food prices, jobs, poverty, violence. And there is always a doubt. When a number changed, was it something the government did, or something that came from outside? And how did each president do, compared with the others? Putting all of that together to form a view is hard.

Newspapers don’t help much. Even when they cite the same number, each one shows it in its own way, and the way it is shown already leans to one side.

So I made this site: neutral, made from data, with every term measured the same way.

The numbers are put on the same scale (for example, per hundred thousand people, or with inflation taken out), so you can compare one term with another. The site follows simple rules that people who work with data use: when the way a number is calculated changes, the page shows the change. Without that, you would compare two things that aren’t alike.

And all of it is easy, and even fun, to look at.

Raian Pollock

See the terms side by sideSee how we count each number

How the site stays neutral

The same rules hold for every term, whoever was in office.

  1. Reagan 11981–1985
  2. Reagan 21985–1989
  3. Bush (H.W.)1989–1993
  4. Clinton 11993–1997
  5. Clinton 21997–2001
  6. Bush (W.) 12001–2005
  7. Bush (W.) 22005–2009
  8. Obama 12009–2013
  9. Obama 22013–2017
  10. Trump 12017–2021
  11. Biden2021–2025
  12. Trump 22025–2029
Every term gets the same space

Each chart gives every term since Reagan one column of the same width, in date order. The term still running is included.

Every number comes from an official source

Every number comes from an official public source: US government agencies, the World Bank, and for recession dates. The caption under each chart names the source. Early figures that an agency may still change never go on a bar.

One colour for every term

Every bar is the same deep teal, a colour that belongs to neither party. When you mark a term, its name takes the same colour.

Words that describe

The site says what each number did during a term. It never says who made it happen. Under every chart is the same sentence:

These numbers show what happened during each term. Congress, the courts, the states, the Federal Reserve and events abroad also move them.

Changes in method are shown

When an agency changes how it counts, the chart says so. Where its old and new figures don’t compare, the term shows two parts.