No, the U.S. Is Not Greece, But...
Brad DeLong is worried. And now I’m worried. He’s worried about “unfunded tax cuts,” which, he says, are “bad juju” in the long run. I don’t mean to pooh-pooh his juju, but what the heck is an “unfunded tax cut”?… Tax cuts leave taxpayers with more money to spend, but they don’t compromise the government’s ability to spend later. Nor is the debt ratio a binding constraint…. Can’t we just admit that the U.S. dollar comes from the U.S. government? That the i$$uer of the currency can never “run out” of money or be forced into bankruptcy…. Until people like us help awaken the population to the way modern money works, the deficit scolds will have the upper hand and the American people will suffer needlessly as Democrats and Republicans alike continue to hide behind the time-honored ”how will we pay for it?”
As I understand it, Stephanie’s hope is that the U.S. government can borrow and spend and that investors will always value U.S. government debt so highly as a safe store of value that, even without high inflation, the real interest rate on the debt will be on balance lower than the real growth rate of the American economy. If so, then the issuing of debt by the U.S. government is a very profitable business indeed: it makes something—safe nominal assets—that investors love and are willing to pay for through the nose, and we can finance whatever we want our government to spend on from the profits of this very profitable debt-issuing business.
If not, then while it is certainly true that the U.S. government cannot be forced into bankruptcy or “run out of money”, it would be imprudent not to take steps now to guard against the possibility of monetary and financial disruption—not now, not five years from now, but thirty or fifty years from now—when we can no longer refinance our debt on easy terms but instead need to retire our outstanding government debt via high taxes or very rapid rates of money creation.
As I have said, repeatedly, austerity now—and probably for the next five years—is counterproductive. But it is not the case that austerity is always and everywhere unneeded.
