It’s about time he screwed up

I was really jonesing for a Joe-Biden-being-Joe-Biden moment. He delivers:

Article here.

Mankiw nervous about new VP’s statement

Greg Mankiw calls out Joe Biden for making a blatantly false claim:

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.

The new administration is still in its honeymoon phase for me… but this makes me nervous as well. It seems like the best we can hope for in this situation is that the VP was just out-of-the-loop on this one and was spouting stuff out (as he has been known to do) without having really thought it through. That still doesn’t make me comfortable, though.