Every policy or initiative across 13 presidential terms that was found to carry meaningful weight on inequality — who it favored, and how much. Click any column heading to sort; click a row to read the full rationale.
Every score in this treatise runs on one scale: negative numbers tilt toward the Common Man, positive numbers tilt toward the Wealthy. The same convention applies everywhere — individual metrics, term net scores, and the numbers in this ledger.
The Direction and Impact columns describe a single policy. The small dashed term score badge under each administration's name is a different thing: it's that entire four-year term's combined score across all six of the treatise's metrics, repeated for every policy from that term for reference — it is not a score for the specific policy in that row. It's placed with the administration's name, not with Direction or Impact, for exactly that reason.
Mixed means a policy's effects cut in different directions for different groups (for example: lower prices for consumers, but wage pressure on a specific group of workers). It does not mean the policy was equally beneficial to everyone — a policy that genuinely helps both the wealthy and the common man with no real trade-off is rare, and is called out explicitly in the underlying document when it occurs.
The four numbers in the strip beneath this box count individual policy actions — they are not a measure of what actually happened to inequality. Counting more common-man-favoring policies does not mean the common man came out ahead over these 49 years; it means more individual actions of that kind were taken. A small number of large, structural actions (tax cuts, financial deregulation, crisis bailouts) can outweigh many smaller protective ones.
| Direction | Policy actions (count) | Impact-weighted total† |
|---|---|---|
| Wealthy | 32 | 74.0 |
| Common Man | 61 | 124.5 |
| Mixed | 42 | 77.5 |
† Sum of each policy's Impact rating (Low=1, Low–Moderate=1.5, Moderate=2, Moderate–High=2.5, High=3). Even weighted this way, the policy tally nominally favors the Common Man — there are simply more protective and expansionary actions in the record than large wealth-concentrating ones.
The actual outcome measure runs the other way. The term-level scores in this treatise (built from real median income, income and wealth shares, labor share, homeownership, and mobility data — not from counting policies) show that 7 of the 13 terms (54%) scored net favorable to the wealthy, versus 4 of 13 (31%) net favorable to the common man (2 were exactly neutral). Weighted by magnitude, 76% of the net directional movement across all 13 terms favored the wealthy, versus 24% favoring the common man. That is the more accurate answer to how inequality actually moved over these 49 years — see the Term Index and Summary for the term-by-term record this is based on.
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