What Prof. Mankiw Forgot to Point Out

Prof. Mankiw of Harvard notes a Wall Street Journal piece on the growth of entitlement, showing 50 percent of U.S. households now get Federal benefits.  He doesn't note this interesting bit of the article:

In current political discourse, it is common to think of the Democrats as the party of entitlements, but long-term trends seem to tell a somewhat different tale. From a purely statistical standpoint, the growth of entitlement spending over the past half-century has been distinctly greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones. Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential, but in any given year, it was on the whole roughly 8% higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat.

Mankiw was, of course, a part of the GWBush administration.