Comparing Presidents, Population of the United States

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m thinking of collecting a lot of posts into a book form. I figure the graphs produce a useful history, even if you don’t believe that the President could possibly have had anything to do with anything involving this country.

So here’s the rough plan going forward for the next few whiles… a few posts on things the President doesn’t control… demographics and maybe some Fed stuff. Then a few on education. Also… I’d like to have a few posts on the military… I’ve found that recently they’ve changed the location for a lot of military data and a lot of the links I have are now broken. I think I can data for number of military personnel from the Statistical Abstract of the US. But… I’m also interested in standards applied to new recruits (I keep hearing that standards have dropped in recent years – is this true?) and one on pay for military personnel… if possible, for enlisted personnel and for officers separately. Anyone have any ideas?

Also… anyone know where I can get annual data on Veteran’s affairs? The Statistical Abstract has assorted years, and the VA site is awful for that purpose. I’ve also located a bit of data on education. Any other topics y’all wanna see covered? No guarantees of course, but I can do my best. And of course, pointing to a data source is not unhelpful.

Anyway, as a starting point… here’s population since 1980 population of the US since 1980. (I can only find detail on various age subgroups through 1980.) As always, I’ve broken it up by President, though I don’t think the President has much effect on population.

Here’s a summary, by Presidency.

I’ll have some posts looking at some specific demographic issues soon. For instance, readers have insisted that one of the explanations for the drop in the murder rate or the rapid increase in real income or some other thing that occurred in the Clinton administration were due in part to demographics (murder to the number of young men, real income to those in their prime earning years, etc.). The data only goes back to 1980, but we can check some of these assertions. I predict that at least some of these assertions are not true.