Paul Krugman: It's Not the Madmen in Authority, It's the Fact That the Academic Scribblers Are Mad...
Paul Krugman:
The Triumph of Bad Ideas: Bill Gross of Pimco calls for more fiscal stimulus and denounces the “anti-Keynesian” consensus. Now he tells us. But can we note just how bizarre our situation is? Keynesian economics has actually come through the crisis with flying colors. The only knock on it is the “Obama tried stimulus and it failed, neener neener” thing — but those of us who took our Keynesianism seriously warned literally from the beginning that the stimulus was far too small. And yet in the political domain Keynesianism is seen as discredited, while various forms of crowding out/austerity is expansionary talk, which have in fact totally failed — look at interest rates! — have become orthodoxy.
Bill Gross
PIMCO Founder To Deficit-Obsessed Congress: Get Back To Reality: Bill Gross, a co-founder of investment management giant PIMCO, says members' of Congress incessant focus on deficit -- and in particular, the manner in which they obsess about deficits -- is foolhardy, and a recipe for disaster. What the country needs, Gross said, is real stimulus now, and a measured return toward fiscal balance in the years ahead.
"Solutions from policymakers on the right or left, however, seem focused almost exclusively on rectifying or reducing our budget deficit as a panacea," Gross writes. "While Democrats favor tax increases and mild adjustments to entitlements, Republicans pound the table for trillions of dollars of spending cuts and an axing of Obamacare. Both, however, somewhat mystifyingly, believe that balancing the budget will magically produce 20 million jobs over the next 10 years. President Obama's long-term budget makes just such a claim and Republican alternatives go many steps further. Former Governor Pawlenty of Minnesota might be the Republicans' extreme example, but his claim of 5% real growth based on tax cuts and entitlement reductions comes out of left field or perhaps the field of dreams. The United States has not had a sustained period of 5% real growth for nearly 60 years."
Both parties, in fact, are moving to anti-Keynesian policy orientations, which deny additional stimulus and make rather awkward and unsubstantiated claims that if you balance the budget, "they will come."...
Unfortunately for Gross and those who share his concerns, the fight over the debt limit seems driven by Republicans hungry for long-standing ideological victories and Democrats cowed into an anti-stimulus fervor whipped up by the right. To many observers it appears that fixing the currently broken economy isn't really what this is about.
Indeed. It is as if the dominant reaction to the stagflation of the 1970s had been a doubling-down of people betting on the static Phillips curve...
