Apparently the Bush Administration is doing something bad with economics.
"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."
You know what, even if I buy the idea that the recession is all Clinton's fault (which I don't), isn't it still Bush's responsibility to clean it up? I mean the reason we had a recession in 2001 might be Clinton's fault, but the reason we still have a recession in 2004, well, I'm comfortable saying that that's President Bush's fault (in so far as any president is responsible for the economy, which i don't believe is very much, actually).
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