Is there any kind of stimulus the US did not try in the last 10 years?
- We had 1% interest rates from Greenspan fueling housing.
- We had wars from Bush and Obama fueling defense industry employment.
- We had two rounds of Quantitative easing from the Fed.
- We had cash-for-clunkers.
- We had two housing tax credit packages.
- We had an $800 billion stimulus package from Congress for “shovel-ready” projects.
- We had stimulus kickbacks to states.
- We had HAMP (Home Affordable Mortgage Program).
- We had bank bailouts out the wazoo to stimulate lending.
- We had Small Business lending programs.
- We had central bank liquidity swaps.
- We had Maiden Lane, Maiden Lane II, and Maiden Lane III
- We had Single Tranche Repurchase agreements
- We had the Citi Asset Guarantee
- We had TALF, TARP, TAF, CPFF, TSLF, MMIFF, TLGP, AMLF, PPIP, and PDCF
- We had so many programs the Fed must have run out of letters because they were not given an acronym.
That is a partial list. Other than bailing out bondholders what exactly do we have to show for any of it? The one-word answer is “debt”.
Decade of Stimulus Yields Nothing But Debt
Caroline Baum wrote an excellent article on this theme. It was so good I asked if I could reproduce it in entirety.
With permission please consider Decade of Stimulus Yields Nothing but Debt: Caroline Baum
When George W. Bush took up residence in the White House in January 2001, total U.S. debt stood at $5.95 trillion. Last week it was $14.3 trillion, with $2.4 trillion freshly authorized by Congress Tuesday.
Ten years and $8.35 trillion later, what do we have to show for this decade of deficit spending? A glut of unoccupied homes, unemployment exceeding 9 percent, a stalled economy and a huge mountain of debt. Real gross domestic product growth averaged 1.6 percent from the first quarter of 2001 through the second quarter of 2011.
It doesn’t sound like a very good trade-off. And now Keynesians are whining about discretionary spending cuts of $21 billion next year? That’s one-half of one percent. And it qualifies as a “cut” only in the fanciful world of government accounting.
The Budget Control Act of 2011 will save $917 billion over 10 years relative to the Congressional Budget Office’s baseline. It leaves the tough work to a bipartisan congressional committee of 12, to be appointed by the leadership in each house. If this supercommittee fails to agree on a minimum of $1.2 trillion of additional savings over 10 years, automatic spending cuts — evenly divided between defense and nondefense — will kick in.
Is there any reason to think the same folks who couldn’t agree on a grand bargain this past month will join hands and find commonality in the next three, with one month off for vacation?
Rosy Scenario
Even if the committee agrees on the prescribed savings by Nov. 23 and Congress enacts them by Dec. 23, as required, laws passed today aren’t binding on future congresses.
Throw in the fact that revenue and budget forecasts tend to be overly optimistic, and there’s even less reason to think Congress has put the U.S. on a sound fiscal path.
In a July 2011 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Harvard economist Jeffrey Frankel identified a pattern of over-optimism in official forecasts, a bias that gets bigger in outer years. (Who can forget the CBO’s 2001 estimate of a 10-year, $5.7 trillion budget surplus?) A fixed budget rule, such as the euro area’s Stability and Growth Pact with its mandated deficit-to-GDP ratios, only exacerbates the tendency.
“Political leaders meet their target by adjusting their forecasts rather than by adjusting their policies,” Frankel writes.
[snip]
Keynesians Always Want More Stimulus
Baum wrote “Some prominent Keynesians are advocating more spending now for an economy that is sputtering.”
She is too polite, but to follow suit I will not name-drop either.
Keynesians always want more stimulus. They claim they don’t, but there is never a time any of them ever wanted to run surpluses or even a balanced budget out of fear of ending a nascent recovery or starting a “recession of choice” as one Keynesian clown put it.
More to the point, the idea that government or the Fed can micro-manage the economy stepping in as needed is absurd. Heck the Fed could not even see a housing bubble or a recession and it is supposed to manage the economy?
