About This Project

Our Approach

We believe showing Americans what happened to their economy is not partisan. The numbers have a point of view. When productivity rises 253% and wages rise 116%, that gap is not an opinion — it is a measurement.

The Legislation Effect pairs decades of federal economic data with the specific laws, court decisions, and executive actions that shaped those trends. We show what each law did, who voted for it, and what happened to measurable economic indicators in the years that followed. Where the data tells a clear story, we say so.

What We Show

Each story on this site pairs real economic data from the Federal Reserve with the laws most relevant to that trend. Each law gets a report card with vote breakdowns by party, key sponsors, and a data-grounded assessment of its measurable outcomes.

Our verdicts are grounded in the numbers — not in ideology. We never say a law was “good” or “bad.” We say what happened: union membership fell, inequality rose, healthcare costs slowed, manufacturing jobs disappeared. You can see who voted for what. Draw your own conclusions about the people who made these choices.

Correlation, Not Causation

Economic outcomes are shaped by countless forces — global events, technology, demographics, prior legislation, market cycles. No single law operates in isolation. When we show that an indicator changed after a law passed, we are showing correlation. The trends are real. The connections are documented. But we are honest about the limits of what any chart can prove.

Data Sources
Economic DataFRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data), maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. All series are publicly available.LegislationCongress.gov for bill text, vote counts, and sponsorship. VoteView for party-line breakdowns on historical votes.Court DecisionsSupreme Court opinions via Justia and the Court's official records.
Methodology

Law selection: We curated 48 laws across labor, finance, healthcare, tax, housing, trade, campaign finance, and social safety net categories. Selection criteria: measurable economic impact and broad public relevance.

Series association: Each law is linked to the FRED indicators most relevant to its policy area. These are editorial judgments — reasonable people may link different indicators.

Normalization: When comparing series on a single chart, values are indexed to 100 at a baseline year. This allows meaningful comparison of series with vastly different scales.

Independence

All data is public domain or openly licensed. This project is not affiliated with any government agency, political party, or advocacy organization. The code and data are open source.