What this collection covers, how each term was scored, and what the 48–year record shows when the 13 terms are read side by side.
This treatise examines the relationship between U.S. presidential administrations and economic inequality across every four-year term from Jimmy Carter's inauguration in 1977 through the current, still-in-progress second Trump term. Each of the 13 terms is covered by a matched pair of documents:
The two documents are designed to be read together: the Trends document gives the scorecard, and the Policy Impact document shows the specific legislative and regulatory actions behind that score.
Every term is scored against the same six metrics, each rated from −2 to +2:
A negative score on any metric means the outcome leaned toward the common household; a positive score means it leaned toward wealth-holders. The six scores sum to a raw total. An external adjustment (−2 to +2) is then applied by hand in cases where a term contains a documented, well-sourced structural event too large for the six metrics to fully capture on their own — the 2008 financial crisis and the 2025 tariff/tax combination are the two largest such adjustments in the set. Raw total plus adjustment produces the net score (−14 to +14), which is placed on a seven-band classification running from “Great For Wealthy” through “Baseline” to “Great For Common Man.”
This scoring is an interpretive framework for organizing a qualitative argument, not an official economic statistic. Every score is explained in prose and grounded in cited sources (Census, CBO, Federal Reserve, IRS/SOI, EPI, CBPP, and others) inside the underlying documents, but reasonable analysts could weigh the same evidence differently. Where a term contains two major actions pulling in opposite directions — which happens more often than not — the documents say so explicitly rather than forcing a one-sided score.
| Term | Years | Net Score | Classification |
|---|---|---|---|
| Carter | 1977–1981 | −2 | Plus For Common Man |
| Reagan 1 | 1981–1985 | +4 | Plus For Wealthy |
| Reagan 2 | 1985–1989 | +2 | Plus For Wealthy |
| Bush (H.W.) | 1989–1993 | +3 | Plus For Wealthy |
| Clinton 1 | 1993–1997 | 0 | Baseline (Neutral) |
| Clinton 2 | 1997–2001 | −5 | Good For Common Man |
| Bush (W.) 1 | 2001–2005 | +4 | Plus For Wealthy |
| Bush (W.) 2 | 2005–2009 | +7 | Good For Wealthy |
| Obama 1 | 2009–2013 | +5 | Good For Wealthy |
| Obama 2 | 2013–2017 | −1 | Plus For Common Man |
| Trump 1 | 2017–2021 | −2 | Plus For Common Man |
| Biden | 2021–2025 | 0 | Baseline (Neutral) |
| Trump 2 interim | 2025–2026† | +7 | Good For Wealthy (interim) |
† Covers the first ~18 months of a term running through January 2029. Treat this row as provisional.
Read in sequence, the 13 terms trace a recognizable shape rather than a flat or steadily worsening line.
Carter's term sits at the tail end of the postwar “Great Compression,” the three-decade span of historically low U.S. inequality, and scores slightly toward the common household. Reagan's first term is where the documented reversal begins: the 1981 tax cut (ERTA), the 1981 domestic spending cuts (OBRA), and the PATCO strike and mass firing combine to mark the statistical inflection point where the bottom half's income share starts its multi-decade decline.
Reagan's second term, Bush (H.W.), and the first Clinton term continue in the same direction, though Clinton's first term is genuinely split down the middle — a progressive tax increase (OBRA-1993) landing in the same four years as the end of the AFDC entitlement (PRWORA), netting almost exactly to baseline. Clinton's second term is the era's clearest exception: a sustained, full-employment labor market from 1996–2000 produced the only period between 1979 and the 2010s where wage growth was fastest for the lowest-paid workers.
The first Bush (W.) term's tax cuts (EGTRRA, JGTRRA) are among the most top-concentrated in the dataset by design. The second Bush (W.) term is the single most wealth-skewed completed term in the treatise, driven by the asymmetry of the 2008 financial crisis response: rapid, large-scale stabilization for financial institutions alongside comparatively limited and slower direct relief for the millions of homeowners who lost their homes.
Obama's first term inherits that crisis's aftermath: an unusually top-heavy recovery (Piketty-Saez tax-data analysis found the top 1% captured 91% of real income gains from 2009 to 2012) even as the ACA and Dodd-Frank were enacted as structural, longer-horizon countermeasures. Obama's second term is where the ACA's coverage effects actually land in the data, alongside another stretch of full employment that pushed 2015 household income up by the largest single-year margin in nearly 50 years.
Trump's first term repeats Clinton 1's pattern at a larger scale: a top-heavy tax cut (the TCJA) and, less than three years later, the largest and fastest income-support intervention in the dataset (the CARES Act), which briefly drove the official poverty rate to a record low during the sharpest recession on record. Biden's term does something similar on a smaller scale: the 2021 Child Tax Credit expansion cut child poverty nearly in half, and its expiration a year later reversed almost the entire gain — one of the most precisely measured natural experiments in the whole treatise.
The second Trump term's first 18 months are dominated by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and a sweeping tariff regime that independent researchers (Yale Budget Lab, CBO, CBPP) found work against each other's stated goals for most households — tariff costs outweighing the tax law's benefits for everyone but the top income decile. This is flagged throughout as interim and subject to revision as the term continues through January 2029.
The document index lists all 13 terms in order with direct links to both documents for each term. Each document is self-contained and cites its own sources, so any term can be read on its own without the others.
A few cross-cutting additions sit alongside the term-by-term documents: