So how's austerity going?

Stimulus, austerity and the weltgeist

The Economist
Feb 1st 2012, 15:05 by M.S.

BEFORE his big speech last week, liberals advised Barack Obama to stay away from arguing about the merits of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ie, the stimulus bill of 2009). While independent economists generally agree that the stimulus saved or created somewhere in the neighbourhood of 2m jobs, it remains unpopular with the general public; the sense was that there was no point engaging on this issue, regardless of the merits. Now ProPublica's Mike Grabell is out with a book-length investigation of the stimulus, titled "Money Well Spent?"

In an interview last week on NPR's Fresh Air, Mr Grabell said the stimulus effort had its good points and its bad points. On the one hand, money funneled to states to forestall budget cuts saved huge numbers of jobs for teachers, firefighters and other employees, and delayed cutbacks in infrastructure spending. He subscribes to the general wisdom that unemployment probably would have hit 12% in 2009 rather than 10% without it. On the other hand, the administration had to drop an idea that almost certainly would have made sense—building a national electric smart grid—because the jurisdictional and red-tape problems made it impossible to implement fast enough. Instead the administration decided to invest in clean energy; but those investments placed their bets too heavily on individual companies, some of which then went bankrupt. In an excerpt from the book on the electric car and battery industry jump-started by stimulus funding, Mr Grabell says the jury is still out: without a rapid pickup in demand for Leafs and Volts (which in turn depends on a big increase in electric charging stations), America's electric-car industry will probably fail to hit critical mass, and it'll wind up relocating to South Korea or China like every other manufacturing industry has.

So, here's the thing. The debate we had about the stimulus probably should have been a lot like the book Mr Grabell has written: a detailed investigation of what does and doesn't work in stimulus spending and whether the government really can jump-start a promising industry through investments, tax breaks and industrial policy. But that wasn't the debate we had. Instead we had a debate about the very concept of whether the government ought to spend money counter-cyclically during a recession in order to keep the economy from collapsing, or whether it should tighten its belt along with consumers and businesses in order to generate confidence in the financial markets and allow markets to clear. We had a debate about whether governments should respond to recessions with deficit spending or austerity.

That was the debate we had. And what's interesting about this particular moment is that while Mr Grabell is writing about what did and didn't work in the stimulus, and Mr Obama is staying away from the topic for political reasons, out there on the barricades what's happening is that the entire argument that governments should engage in austerity appears to be collapsing.

Item 1: Over the past month, Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong, and Simon Wren-Lewis engaged in an interminable duel with Tyler Cowen, Scott Sumner, sort-of Karl Smith (occupying as usual an esoteric position not easily placed on the ideological grid), and probably some other people I'm forgetting—over an old argument by John Cochrane claiming that the multiplier effect of government stimulus spending probably ought to be zero. The argument by Mr Cochrane was a critical document in the stimulus debate, because it was an articulation in more-or-less public discourse by a well-respected economist of a mechanism through which increased government spending could fail to raise GDP or increase employment at all. Essentially every working practical economist and forecaster believed that the stimulus, like any other government spending, would raise aggregate demand, GDP, and employment. Republican politicians were arguing that it would not, and Mr Cochrane backed them up.

Two weeks ago, Mr Cochrane responded to the argument in a fashion that suggested that either he has changed his mind, or he never thought what the expansionary-austerity people claimed he did in the first place.

Let's be clear what the "fiscal stimulus" argument is and is not about.It is not about the proposition that governments should run deficits in recessions. They should, for simple tax-smoothing, consumption-smoothing, and social-insurance reasons, just as governments should finance wars with debt. That doesn't justify all deficits—one can still argue that our government used the recession to radically increase permanent spending. But disliking "stimulus" is not the same thing as calling for an annually balanced budget.Nor is it about debt financing of "infrastructure" or other genuine investments. If the project is valuable, do it. And recessions, with low interest rates and available workers, are good times to do it... Stimulus [is] still an economically interesting proposition, and there is a great deal of uncertainty about whether, when, and how well it might work.

Okay. There's a lot of nuance here. But as Noah Smith pointed out in response, if the basic gist is that governments should run deficits in recessions to smooth consumption, deliver social insurance, and take advantage of low interest rates to invest in infrastructure...then the policies Mr Cochrane is recommending here are to the left of anything Congress is contemplating passing right now.

Item 2: Niall Ferguson has spent the last three years arguing, contra Paul Krugman, that America is courting disaster by allowing deficits to balloon its national debt to such high levels, and will have to reign in spending or face a crippling rise in interest rates. Last week, in an interview with Henry Blodget, he admitted defeat.

BLODGET: That is a shockingly optimistic view of the United States from you. Are you conceding to Paul Krugman that over the near-term we shouldn't worry so much?
FERGUSON: I think the issue here got a little confused, because Krugman wanted to portray me as a proponent of instant austerity, which I never was. My argument was that over ten years you have to have some credible plan to get back to fiscal balance because at some point you lose your credibility because on the present path, Congressional Budget Office figures make it clear, with every year the share of Federal tax revenues going to interest payments rises, there is a point after which it's no longer credible. But I didn't think that point was going to be this year or next year. I think the trend of nominal rates in the crisis has been the trend that he forecasted. And you know, I have to concede that.

I could go on. This comes on top of criticisms of austerity policies from the IMF, intense pressure at Davos on the German government to countenance increased spending by northern European countries and looser monetary policy at the ECB, and so forth. To some extent what we're seeing here is the backwash from the euro-zone crisis hitting the American economic debate. If you think that the German-led European solution to the euro-zone crisis is deeply confused, and a lot of Americans do, then you have to be troubled by the ways in which it resembles what austerity proponents would have liked America's response to the financial crisis to have been. Americans are starting to recognise that our recovery is further along than other advanced countries' in part because the way we handled the financial crisis wasn't really so awful. And that includes the stimulus.

The presidential election this year is in large measure a referendum on Barack Obama's economic policies. In the broad terms in which it is seen by the electorate, it's a debate over Keynesian deficit spending versus expansionary austerity. The 2010 elections took place at a moment when people seemed to have lost faith in Keynesianism. The 2012 elections are taking place at a moment when people have lost faith in expansionary austerity.