Inventing The "Clinton Recession" (Mankiw strikes again)

[DemoTex]

No one should be surprised when economic or budget forecasts coming out of Washington are influenced by politics, especially during an election year. But when economic history is rewritten -- with political consequences -- that's going too far. President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, chaired by Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, is trying to get away with exactly such revisionist history. The CEA's Economic Report of the President, released Feb. 9, unilaterally changed the start date of the last recession to benefit Bush's reelection bid. Instead of using the accepted start date of March, 2001, the CEA announced that the recession really started in the fourth quarter of 2000 -- a shift that would make it much more credible for the Bush Administration to term it the "Clinton Recession." In a subsequent press conference, Mankiw said that the CEA had looked at the available data and "made the call." This simple statement masks an attack on one of the few remaining bastions of economic neutrality. For almost 75 years, the start and end dates of recessions have been set by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a private nonpartisan research group based in Cambridge, Mass. (More ..)

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_08/b3871044.htm

[madrchsod]

1. mankiw is toast

after hastrett and don manzullo said he should be gone, he has lost all creditability in the business community.who gives a crap when it started,bush hasn`t done a dam thing about the jobs. when two northern il. republicans don`t buy mankiw nobody will...

[RedEarth]

2. Good post.......I was just reading that article on BW

and was going to share it with duers. Once again this admin is trying to rewrite history. Starting to sound a little like what other dictators have done.