Category Archives: conservatives and liberals

The US & Europe Could Look South to Re-learn Countercyclical Fiscal Policy

Share Button

During much of the last decade, U.S. fiscal policy has been procyclical, that is, destabilizing.   We wasted the opportunity of the 2003-07 expansion by running large budget deficits.   As a result, in 2010, Washington now feels constrained by inherited debts to withdraw fiscal stimulus at a time when unemployment is still high.   Fiscal policy in the UK and other European countries has been even more destabilizing over the last decade.  Governments decide to expand when the economy is strong and then contract when it is weak, thereby exacerbating the business cycle.     read more

Share Button

Republican Congressmen Pledge to Repeal the Laws of Arithmetic

Share Button

The National Journal asks what would happen if the Pledge to America, proposed last week by congressional Republicans, were fully implemented.

     As I understand it, the authors of the “Pledge to America” want not just to renew permanently all Bush-era tax cuts, but also to balance the budget while exempting social security, Medicare, and military spending.   To ask what would be the effects if the Republicans put this pledge into law is to ask what would be the effects if they repeal the laws of arithmetic.   It can’t be done.  All the money is in the parts of the budget they are putting off limits.  (That is what we all assume they mean by “common sense exceptions for seniors, veterans and troops” when cutting spending.  Admittedly, it is hard to tell what they are really proposing, due to the usual lack of specifics in the 21-page document.)  read more

Share Button

Red States, Blue States and the Distribution of Federal Spending

Share Button

           April 1 is Census Day.  Evidently Glenn Beck and Michele Bachmann have been encouraging Americans to boycott the census — to refuse to fill out the whole form.   This protest follows from their small government ideology.

           I am not always sure what they, or Republicans, or Tea Party participants mean by small government.  They say they want a government that intervenes less in the economic sphere.   Perhaps they don’t like the idea that the census numbers are used, among other things, to determine the allocation of federal spending across states, because they don’t think it is the business of the government to redistribute income.  That is “socialism.”    Even “Stalinism.” read more

Share Button