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J. Bradford DeLong and Laura D. Tyson: Discretionary Fiscal Policy as a Stabilization Policy Tool: What Do We Think Now That We Did Not Think in 2007?

J. Bradford DeLong and Laura D. Tyson: Discretionary Fiscal Policy as a Stabilization Policy Tool: What Do We Think Now That We Did Not Think in 2007?

DRAFT 1.4: May 31, 2013: 31 pp. 8166 words

Six years ago there was near-consensus among economists and policymakers alike in support of Taylor's (2000) argument that aggregate demand management was the near-exclusive domain of central banks. Today central bankers like Federal Reserve Chair Bernanke (2013) are actively asking for help by fiscal authorities. What caused this shift? In part, the course of interest rates has made the costs of discretionary expansionary fiscal policy lower than anyone would have believed. In part, the benefits via Keynesian multiplier processes appear to have been much larger than was presumed. And in large part monetary policy has proven inadequate to the task without undertaking risky and untried non-standard policy measures at a scale that has so far proven too large for central banks to risk. Against this shift in the benefit-cost calculus toward use of discretionary expansionary fiscal policy in the current conjuncture we must set uncertain long-run costs of debt accumulation. These costs, however, remain especially hard to analyze, as they seem to substantially consist of “unknown unknowns”.

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