Harvard Economist Greg Mankiw Quits the Republican Party

Greg Mankiw

The world's greatest economic textbook salesman has quit the Republican Party.

Harvard professor Greg Mankiw writes at his blog:

I am no longer a Republican

I just came back from city hall, where I switched my voter registration from Republican to unenrolled (aka independent). Two reasons:

First, the Republican Party has largely become the Party of Trump. Too many Republicans in Congress are willing, in the interest of protecting their jobs, to overlook Trump's misdeeds (just as too many Democrats were for Clinton during his impeachment). I have no interest in associating myself with that behavior. Maybe someday, the party will return to having honorable leaders like Bush, McCain, and Romney. Until then, count me out.

Second, in Massachusetts, unenrolled voters can vote in either primary. The Democratic Party is at a crossroads, where it has to choose either a center-left candidate (Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Yang) or a far-left populist (Warren, Sanders) as their nominee for president. I intend to help them choose the former. The latter propose to move the country too far in the direction of heavy-handed state control. And in doing so, they tempt those in the center and center-right to hold their noses and vote for Trump's reelection.

Mankiw is total establishment. He is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Economics at Harvard University and an adviser to the Congressional Budget Office and the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and New York. From 2003 to 2005 he served as Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisers.

You would think that as the one time head of the Harvard economics department and long-time teacher of the introductory course in economics at Harvard that he would have had some influence in guiding some very bright students away from socialism, but apparently not. Socialism is as popular at Harvard as it is at Berkeley. He has had zero impact on campus.

He is, thus, reduced to leaving the Republican Party and performing minor league rearguard action by voting for the least socialist of the bunch of socialist Democratic presidential candidates in the running.

-RW