For those who don’t know who Greg Mankiw is ...
He is an American macroeconomist. From 2003 to 2005, Mankiw was the chairman of President Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors. His publications are ranked as the 22nd most influential of the over 18,000 economists registered with RePEc according to that organization.
Mankiw was born in Trenton, New Jersey. In his youth, he attended the Pingry School, and then graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1980 with an AB in Economics.
He spent a year working on his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a subsequent year studying at Harvard Law School.
He worked as a staff economist for the Council of Economic Advisers from 1982-83, foreshadowing his later position as chairman of that organization. After leaving the Council, he earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984.
He taught at MIT for a year and then became an assistant professor of Economics at Harvard University in 1985 and full professor in 1987.
He returned to politics when he was appointed by President George W. Bush as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors in May 2003. He has since resumed teaching at Harvard, taking over the introductory economics course Social Analysis 10 (affectionately referred to as “Ec. 10”). This is the same course that had been taught for many years by Martin Feldstein. Mankiw is currently a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
He has written two popular college-level textbooks: one in intermediate macroeconomics and the more famous Principles of Economics, which is popular among high-school Advanced Placement Economics teachers. More than one million copies of the books have been sold in seventeen languages.
Well, of course, after all that schooling, he would want to raise the gasoline tax to ‘make up for’ another tax cut. Heaven forbid the government would have to cut back while the rest of us tighten our belts. Perish the thought.
Sorry to say, I’m not impressed with Mr. Mankiw’s ideas or his background.