Now that the election is over and the issue of who will handle the economy for the next four years has been decided, here is a little secret: It really didn't matter who won.

The economy is at a point in its recovery/expansion that, by the numbers, would make either candidate look pretty good four years from now. If past is prelude, the nation can expect to see jobs perk up -- witness Friday's big jump in payrolls, with 337,000 jobs added in October and gains in August and September revised up another 113,000 -- and the overall economy to go on cruise control, with annual growth averaging 3 percent or better through 2008.

A big factor behind this, of course, is that productivity's rapid gains are behind, having peaked at 5.7 percent in last year's third quarter before falling to just below 2 percent in this year's July-September quarter. In short, that means businesses have wrested about all the additional output they can from existing workers and must start adding workers if they want to keep growing,

With more people getting jobs and receiving paychecks, consumer spending can remain robust, creating the sort of internal growth fuel that keeps an economy humming during good times.

Corporate profits also can be expected to ride this growth wave, benefiting not only from higher sales but from investments made in technology and equipment and efficiencies gleaned from the past recession.

To be sure, some of the best gains may be past, now that companies are going to have to start hiring and potentially paying workers more to lure and keep talent. Profit margins already have started to fall from their early year peaks, but that's after a hefty three-year ride.

What this all means is that while President Bush may reap the benefits and acclaim for the economy's performance come 2008, he will not have done that much to create it. Businesses decide when to spend, when to hire and when to raise wages based not on what is happening on Capitol Hill or in the White House but what is happening in Peoria, Ill., Pittsburgh and Portland, Ore., and for that matter, in Beijing, London, Moscow and New Delhi.

If there is money to be made and sales to be had, businesses will expand and grow until the point at which they, and consumers, have overdone it, forcing everyone to pull back and pushing the economy back into recession. It has been thus since the Industrial Revolution, and it will be thus amid the coming revolution in nanotechnology, biotechnology and all other things technology.

Indeed, woe be unto the president who attempts to meddle too much into the affairs of the economy. To wit: Richard Nixon's wage-and-price controls and successor Gerald Ford's "Whip Inflation Now" campaign. Both tried to impose ceilings on prices, particularly for energy, in the 1970s when inflation was picking up and oil prices were on the rise. And their efforts, which weren't fully revoked until Ronald Reagan was president, failed miserably.

A friend of mine likened the attempts to control prices to tethering a balloon to the bottom of a glass of water. While businesses may have not been able to pass on higher costs, they nonetheless were confronting them in everything from energy to raw materials to labor. So those pressures acted to expand the balloon, which once unleashed, i.e., when the price controls were lifted, only served to fuel inflation even more as businesses and labor rushed to make up lost ground.

President Carter sought to intervene in a different manner in 1980, invoking emergency powers to force the Federal Reserve to restrict the availability of credit. The move, aimed at clamping down on runaway inflation and interest rates, worked too well. It cut off lending and pushed the economy into its first, albeit, brief recession in 1980, which after a short rally, lapsed back into a deep recession a year and half later.

This is not to suggest that presidents don't have influence over the economy, particularly over the longer term. Almost every mainstream economist agrees there are major outstanding issues that threaten the long-term health of the U.S. economy, particularly for the next generation, including escalating health-care costs, the quality of education, a dependence on foreign sources for energy and perhaps most important, mounting government debt and inadequate private savings.

"The legacy of our fiscal profligacy in the context of looming needs may rob us not only of the resources we need to sustain our competitive edge in the global economy, but also erode our desire," Richard Berner, U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley, wrote in an essay last spring. "A geriatric society, one eager to protect old jobs instead of creating new ones, may be reluctant to invest, to take risks, and to innovate, undermining the productivity that will help it survive and flourish."

Still, those are issues for the longer term, which often means they are issues that presidents either avoid or appoint an independent commission to address. In the short run, "presidents have little effect on the economy except to extent that there is good steady leadership at the Federal Reserve and good, steady leadership at the Treasury," observes Richard Marston, a finance and economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

As examples, Marston cites Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, who has steered the economy through two stock market collapses (1987 and 2000-2002), two recessions (1991 and 2001) and the 9/11 attacks; and Robert Rubin, President Clinton's Treasury secretary who kept global markets calm while engineering a bailout of Mexico during a massive peso devaluation crisis.

Marston cites one more area over which presidents have influence but rarely get it right -- tax policy. On this front, he gives Bush credit for pushing through his first round of tax cuts before there officially was a recession, a "perfectly timed move" that -- combined with the Fed's unprecedented interest rates cuts -- help make the last slump one of the mildest on record.

That, of course, is political capital that Bush was quick to trumpet during his campaign (never mind that Marston and many other economists view the later 2003 tax cuts as unnecessary and potentially harmful for further driving up the deficit). It also was a preview of what Bush and the Republicans will crow about in 2008, following what is likely to be a nice four-year stretch of job and economic growth. Not as good as Clinton's second term, when budget surpluses instead of deficits abetted growth, but still "a pretty decent solid economy growing at about 3 percent a year," forecasts Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com,

Democrats can only wince and wish that challenger John F. Kerry got elected. Then he, much like Al Gore did in 2000 after the eight-year stretch of growth under Clinton that actually started under President Bush's father, could have claimed to have fixed the nation's economic ills.

But remember this: No matter who won, the credit for the coming period of better economic times should go to the people most responsible: business owners and workers.