Poor Greg Mankiw

Mother Jones

But aside from the fact that Mankiw plays fast and loose with the actual tax laws, this is only true if (a) you're motivated solely by how much money you leave your children, and (b) you care about income 30 years in the future as much as you do about income right now. This doesn't describe any actual human beings, and I don't think it describes Mankiw. (I doubt very much that he doubled his production of outside writing after the Bush tax cuts went into effect.) If he'd laid out the incentives honestly — a small tax increase might reduce his incentive to write misleading op-eds by a small amount — that would have been OK. But that's not what he did.

But being dishonest is so unlike a Republican.