The claim that
the last recession started under Clinton is absolutely true. To deny this is not only to blame Bush for a problem he didn't cause, but to deprive him of the credit for fixing it with effective policies — which is exactly why the Left is so eager in this case. Here, however, are the facts:
The unemployment rate bottomed at 3.8 percent in April 2000, and started deteriorating steadily from there (during the Clinton administration).
The fed funds rate — the overnight interest rate administered by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve — peaked at 6.5 percent in 2000, and had to be lowered in an emergency move on January 3, 2001, "in light of further weakening of sales and production" (during the Clinton administration).
As the chart below shows, GDP growth fell off a cliff in the third quarter of 2000 (during the Clinton administration). Despite the shock of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, growth started to revive in the fourth quarter of 2001 (during the Bush administration).
The one and only piece of evidence offered by Media Matters that’s to the contrary is that fact that the National Bureau of Economic Research set the beginning of the last recession at March 2001 — two months into the Bush administration. Check that date on the chart above: This well-respected economic research group set the beginning of the recession after GDP growth had already crashed from almost 5 percent to near zero. But according to Media Matters, this single authority determines truth, and everyone else is a liar.
The article declares that "if NBER says the recession began in March 2001, the recession began in March 2001."
The reality is that NBER is just like any other group of economists, struggling with partial and imperfect information to characterize phenomena that don't have any hard-and-fast definitions. Since NBER set the March 2001 recession start date in November 2001, there have been important negative revisions to key data. Most important, back then GDP growth for the third quarter of 2000 was reported at 1.3 percent — but now it's been revised all the way down to a negative 0.5 percent. NBER had no way of knowing that then.
In fact, NBER has been on the verge of changing the recession’s start date for this very reason. According to the Washington Post earlier this year,
NBER President Martin Feldstein said, "It is clear that the revised data have made our original March date for the start of the recession much too late," but he did not offer a different date. "We are still waiting for additional monthly data before making a final judgment," said Feldstein, a Harvard University economist. "Until we have the additional data, we cannot make a decision."
Media Matters chooses not to mention this fact.
Donald Luskin on Media Matters for America & the Clinton Recession on NRO Financial