TW: When the economy is doing well the Republican want to cut taxes on the wealthy, when the economy is doing poorly they wish to cut spending. The results of such policies have been poor yet many folks hue their line. Here is a progressive economists take on the situation. Demoguery is a bi-partisan sport but the demoguery on the right is reaching new heights. When someone a viciously bad as Karl Rove is writing editorials in the WSJ about the need for conservative fiscal policy, one knows the shark has been jumped.
From Brad Delong at Project Syndicate:
"From the day after the collapse of Lehman Brothers last year, the policies followed by the United States Treasury, the US Federal Reserve, and the administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been sound and helpful. The alternative – standing back and letting the markets handle things – would have brought ... higher unemployment than now exists. Credit easing and support of the banking system helped significantly...
The fact that investment bankers did not go bankrupt last December and are profiting immensely this year is a side issue. Every extra percentage point of unemployment lasting for two years costs $400 billion. A recession twice as deep as the one we have had would have cost the US roughly $2 trillion – and cost the world as a whole four times as much. In comparison, the bonuses at Goldman Sachs are a rounding error. ...
The Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus has also significantly helped the economy. Though the jury is still out on the effect of the tax cuts in the stimulus, aid to states has been a job-saving success, and the flow of government spending on a whole variety of relatively useful projects is set to boost production and employment in the same way that consumer spending boosts production and employment.
And the cost of carrying the extra debt incurred is extraordinarily low: $12 billion a year of extra taxes ... at current interest rates. For that price, American taxpayers will get an extra $1 trillion of goods and services, and employment will be higher by about ten million job-years.
The valid complaints about fiscal policy ... are not that it has run up the national debt..., but rather that ... we ought to have done more. Yet these policies are political losers now: nobody is proposing more stimulus. This is strange... Good policies that are boosting production and employment without causing inflation ought to be politically popular, right?
With respect to Obama’s stimulus package, it seems to me that there has been extraordinary intellectual and political dishonesty on the American right, which the press refuses to see. For two and a half centuries, economists have believed that the flow of spending in an economy goes up whenever groups of people decide to spend more... – and government decisions to spend more are as good as anybody else’s. ...
Obama’s Republican opponents, who claim that fiscal stimulus cannot work, rely on arguments that are incoherent at best, and usually simply wrong, if not mendacious. Remember that back in 1993, when the Clinton administration’s analyses led it to seek to spend less and reduce the deficit, the Republicans said that that would destroy the economy, too. Such claims were as wrong then as they are now. But how many media reports make even a cursory effort to evaluate them?
A stronger argument, though not by much, is that the fiscal stimulus is boosting employment and production, but at too great a long-run cost because it has produced too large a boost in America's national debt. If interest rates on US Treasury securities were high and rising rapidly as the debt grew, I would agree... But interest rates on US Treasury securities are very low...
Those who claim that America has a debt problem, and that a debt problem cannot be cured with more debt, ignore (sometimes deliberately) that private debt and US Treasury debt have been very different animals – moving in different directions and behaving in different ways – since the start of the financial crisis. /blockquote>
What the market is saying is not that the economy has too much debt, but that it has too much private debt, which is why prices of corporate bonds are low and firms find financing expensive. The market is also saying – clearly and repeatedly – that the economy has too little public US government debt, which is why everyone wants to hold it."
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong96/English
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