Greg Mankiw today denounces the faulty memory of "Democratic partisans". Kettle, meet pot:
Greg Mankiw, May 2012:
Greg Mankiw's Blog: Faulty Memories: [A]s I recall, President Bush did not spend as much time blaming his predecessor for bequeathing him a sick economy as President Obama has.
Greg Mankiw, working for George W. Bush, January 2004:
Econbrowser: The 2001 recession revisited: [Data] revisions… strongly suggest that the business-cycle peak was before March 2001. The median date of the peak for the five series discussed here is October 2000. Other data support the notion that economic activity had slowed sharply or even begun to decline by this point, including the stock market, business investment, and initial unemployment claims. For these reasons, the analyses throughout this chapter (including the charts that compare this recession to past recessions) use the fourth quarter of 2000 as the peak of economic activity and the start of the recession…
Mankiw appears to forget not only what he wrote in 2004, but that bequeathing your successors with an unemployment rate rising to 10.0% within a year is very different than unemployment bequeathing your successors with an unemployment rate rising to 5.7% within a year…
