Joe the Dumber Speaks, Again

I had thought, well, I had hoped that Obama still had him locked in a closet somewhere, but apparently they still let him speak occasionally. Economist Gregory Mankiw, or as I call him, the anti-Krugman, takes him to task for his recent statement on the stimulus bill:

In a TV interview last month, Vice President Joe Biden said the following:

Every economist, as I've said, from conservative to liberal, acknowledges that direct government spending on a direct program now is the best way to infuse economic growth and create jobs.

That statement is clearly false. As I have documented on this blog in recent weeks, skeptics about a spending stimulus include quite a few well-known economists, such as (in alphabetical order) Alberto Alesina, Robert Barro, Gary Becker, John Cochrane, Eugene Fama, Robert Lucas, Greg Mankiw, Kevin Murphy, Thomas Sargent, Harald Uhlig, and Luigi Zingales--and I am sure there many others as well. Regardless of whether one agrees with them on the merits of the case, it is hard to dispute that this list is pretty impressive, as judged by the standard objective criteria by which economists evaluate one another. If any university managed to hire all of them, it would immediately have a top ranked economics department.

Ouch. It well worth reading the rest. I didn't realize that Mankiw had a blog. It is not on my to read list.