"Lies, damned lies, and statistics."
My issues with articles like this is it depends on which metric you chose to highlight, and one can spin data to tell any number of different narratives. This is a few years old, but a good example:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/01/07/the-story-behind-obama-and-the-national-debt-in-7-chartsAnd it also assumes that the president has control over the economy, which is laughable if you stop to think about it even a little bit. The graphs largely reflect economic cycles, and no one has been able to establish a causal link between an administration and what's going on in the economy. The problem (which is really a feature of our system) is that the president has limited powers and does not write laws or set spending... this is the responsibility of congress. During the Reagan years he was dealing with Democratic control in congress, whereas Clinton admin was dealing with a Republican controlled congress for most of his term, then Bush W. was dealing with a Democratic congress, and then Obama with a Republican congress. One could argue that the president matters much less than congress, and the debt has tended to improve when congress is under Republican control... though I still think this is far to simplistic and doesn't tell the whole story. But I do think we have an unrealistic fascination with the Presidency and place far too much importance on it.
