There's misuderstanding something, and deliberately misunderstanding something.

I think Mankiw is doing the latter. He's being tendentious, and he knows it, and doesn't care if we know it too.

Which is more or less the definition of 'hack'.

What Machina said. "Using an ellipsis that cuts through four paragraphs in the original article"?! I wouldn't even do him the favor of using the word 'tendentious'. He's just lying.

Another example of how dishonesty is not considered a particularly significant sin in our political discourse.

When I hear it will total $7 trillion, and that would pay off half the mortgages in America, I think...

Why not say F U to the banks, and actually pay off half the mortgages in America. Think there would be new spending then? I do. And at least it would be helping a lot of regular folks, and not just bankers who don't deserve it.

The whole thing makes my stomach sick.

I never suspect that Republicans are lying when you can just as easily point to incompetence.

you miss the obvious point that the stimulus plan will also prevent more job losses!!!

All very true, but like most things, what matters most is what storyline emerges. And let us not forget one other point of the stimulus. Planned construction of an evil underground secret volcano lair.

No, no, the evil underground volcano lair belongs to Rupert Murdoch.

Boiling complex events down to x/y=z sounds like fun. Let me try:

Take the total cost of both wars and divide it by the amount of WMD's we've found to figure out how much it costs to each WMD.

Taking the limit as y -> 0...and we get INFINITY. Infinity dollars per WMD.

Mankiw Math wins again.

"You know who else is inefficient? Wal-Mart. With almost $400 billion in revenue and only 2 million employees, the Bentonville retailer is paying an average of $184,614 per employee. And they're considered an innovator in lowering labor costs!"

I think the right analogy would be to say Walmart generates about $200,000 in revenue per employee. He's trying to equate the national revenue generated from the addition jobs by the cost.

Now, if that cost includes a number of ancillary programs not directly tied to revenue/jobs generation, then the cost to revenue ratio gets closer to the 2.0 he speaks of as being typical of a Keynesian model. And having read the article, I didn't see any mention of these other programs, but maybe I missed it.

Anonymous, are you saying that you think Obama's stimulus plan is nothing but a $700 billion make work program for 2.5 million people? That it includes no plans to actually do useful things?

If you spend $1 billion building a bridge and employ 100 people for a year, this is not the same thing as giving each worker a million dollars. You also get a bridge. Is that difficult to understand?

normally i try not to post just to say "what x said," but in the case of that scoundrel, greg mankiw, i'm willing to make an exception: what Davis X Machina and NBarnes said!

how mankiw can look himself in the mirror every day is beyond me: he was a key economic policy maker for the bush administration for crissake. he belongs in another line of work, one where honesty and competence aren't all that important.

Is that difficult to understand?

It's impossible to understand, if your world view depends on not understanding it. Think of Anonymous as one of the Cardinals grilling Galileo, or going over Copernicus' De Revolutionibus looking for heresy.

You can't refute a theology, Rob Mac -- it's a noble but futile effort. It's like milking a cement cow. The cow doesn't notice, you wreck your hands, and no milk results.

Well $280,000 is in the ballpark of what it would cost to open an inexpensive franchise business, which amounts to buying a job for yourself. And you'll be darn lucky to earn $28,000 the first few years.

Wow! My apologies for not jumping down Mankiw's throat; evidently, that’s not cool. As Davis says, you can't refute Theology and the Theology's thick here.
And Davis, based on the vitriol in your comment, I think you’re more likely to be the Cardinal than I.
Rob Mac writes:
"If you spend $1 billion building a bridge and employ 100 people for a year, this is not the same thing as giving each worker a million dollars."
No, that would be the $100M, but whatever.
Note the last part of my comment. I reread the article and noticed the part about infrastructure spending. So yes, we're going to get a bridge out of the deal, the value of which isn't the bridge itself, but its value relative to the one it's replacing.

Correction: the value of the bridge relative to not replacing the bridge (which may or may not exist).

Also: isn't "underground volcano lair" redundant? Only a Michael Scherer-level idiot would build a volcano lair in the path of a lava flow.

It's already begun. NPR quoted from Mankiw's blog and from his readers this morning. Nary a mention of his political philosophy.

Anonymous writes:
Rob Mac writes:
"If you spend $1 billion building a bridge and employ 100 people for a year, this is not the same thing as giving each worker a million dollars."
No, that would be the $100M, but whatever.

$10M.

Geez, I didn't think Hartman's Law applied to arithmetic...

100 x $1M gets you? You're right though, to optimize cheek, I should have done the $1B/100. Regardless, our math is good, Rob Mac's... not so sure.

I don't really see why Mankiw is still held in any respect by other economists. He's been called out time and time again for basic intellectual dishonesty.