Delong Smackdown Watch: ProGrowth Liberal
Over at Econonospeak, PGL writes:
EconoSpeak: One Quibble with Brad DeLong’s Platform for the Bipartisan Technocrats: Let me endorse almost all of Brad’s platform for the bipartisan technocrats which is what he says Robert Rubin should be saying. It is classic Rubinomics endorsing long-term fiscal restraint with short-term fiscal stimulus:
Recovery: when every fired local, state, and federal worker takes a private sector job down as well and when the U.S. government can borrow at today's absurdly-low terms, it is criminal stupidity not to pull government spending forward into the present and push taxes back into the future (all within the ten-year PAYGO rule, of course). Since the macroeconomic situation is worse now than it was ever projected to get when the first Recovery Act was passed and since the U.S. government can borrow on better terms now than it could at the time of the first Recovery Act, it is time for a second Recovery Act--fifty percent federal government purchases and aid to the states, fifty percent tax cuts--somewhat larger than the first was.
Accelerating government purchases is a no-brainer (except to those political fools who govern us by saying “no” to anything that comes from the Obama White House). Federal revenue sharing is another no-brainer.
My quibble is with Brad’s suggestion that half of the 2nd Recovery Act should be half from tax cuts. Why? Well in the standard Keynesian model, the impact effect from a dollar of tax cuts is dampened by the marginal propensity to consume as at least some of the tax cut is saved even by borrowing constrained households. For households that are not borrowing constrained, pushing taxes back has no effect on consumption demand today. In other words, the more of the supposed fiscal stimulus that comes from tax cuts – the less bang for the buck we get. Was not this one of the problems with the first Recovery Act?
Indeed. PGL is correct--the bang-for-buck is likely to be lower.
But this is supposed to be a platform for bipartisanship, after all, and bipartisanship requires giving the masters of the Republican Party a big share of the cookies all of the time.
