Failed Stimulus

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Fixing Fiscal Insanity: 6 Plans

from Solutions Initiative sponsored by the Peterson Foundation

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David Stockman: Four Deformations of the Apocalypse

The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice...

Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes...

More specifically, the new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one.

The first of these started when the Nixon administration defaulted on American obligations under the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement to balance our accounts with the world. Now, since we have lived beyond our means as a nation for nearly 40 years, our cumulative current-account deficit — the combined shortfall on our trade in goods, services and income — has reached nearly $8 trillion. That’s borrowed prosperity on an epic scale.

It is also an outcome that Milton Friedman said could never happen when, in 1971, he persuaded President Nixon to unleash on the world paper dollars no longer redeemable in gold or other fixed monetary reserves...

The second unhappy change in the American economy has been the extraordinary growth of our public debt. In 1970 it was just 40 percent of gross domestic product, or about $425 billion. When it reaches $18 trillion, it will be 40 times greater than in 1970. This debt explosion has resulted not from big spending by the Democrats, but instead the Republican Party’s embrace, about three decades ago, of the insidious doctrine that deficits don’t matter if they result from tax cuts.

In 1981, traditional Republicans supported tax cuts, matched by spending cuts, to offset the way inflation was pushing many taxpayers into higher brackets and to spur investment. The Reagan administration’s hastily prepared fiscal blueprint, however, was no match for the primordial forces — the welfare state and the warfare state — that drive the federal spending machine...

The third ominous change in the American economy has been the vast, unproductive expansion of our financial sector. Here, Republicans have been oblivious to the grave danger of flooding financial markets with freely printed money and, at the same time, removing traditional restrictions on leverage and speculation. As a result, the combined assets of conventional banks and the so-called shadow banking system (including investment banks and finance companies) grew from a mere $500 billion in 1970 to $30 trillion by September 2008.

But the trillion-dollar conglomerates that inhabit this new financial world are not free enterprises. They are rather wards of the state, extracting billions from the economy with a lot of pointless speculation in stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives. They could never have survived, much less thrived, if their deposits had not been government-guaranteed and if they hadn’t been able to obtain virtually free money from the Fed’s discount window to cover their bad bets.

The fourth destructive change has been the hollowing out of the larger American economy. Having lived beyond our means for decades by borrowing heavily from abroad, we have steadily sent jobs and production offshore. In the past decade, the number of high-value jobs in goods production and in service categories like trade, transportation, information technology and the professions has shrunk by 12 percent, to 68 million from 77 million.

The day of national reckoning has arrived. We will not have a conventional business recovery now, but rather a long hangover of debt liquidation and downsizing — as suggested by last week’s news that the national economy grew at an anemic annual rate of 2.4 percent in the second quarter. Under these circumstances, it’s a pity that the modern Republican Party offers the American people an irrelevant platform of recycled Keynesianism when the old approach — balanced budgets, sound money and financial discipline — is needed more than ever.

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Cartoon: Fiscal?

Cartoon: Fiscal Responsibility

Bernanke Backs Obama's Fiscal Policy

The chairman of the Federal Reserve on Tuesday tacitly endorsed President Obama’s call for huge increases in spending and trillion-dollar deficits over the next couple of years, saying the economic crisis required aggressive action.

Though the chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, did not endorse any of Mr. Obama’s specific proposals, he echoed the president’s call for bold government action to address the economy’s immediate travails and pointedly refused to criticize his longer-term
plans.

“All else equal, this is a development that all of us would have preferred to avoid,” Mr. Bernanke told the Senate Budget Committee, referring to record-breaking deficits expected this year and in the next two years. “But our economy and financial markets face extraordinary challenges, and a failure by policy makers to address these challenges in a timely way would likely be more costly in the end.”

read the New York Times article

My thoughts: Not a big surprise. It these guys are so confident that they can solve the problem, why are they incapable of preventing the problems to begin with?

Fiscal Stimulus: Too Little, Too Late

The history of anti-recession efforts is that they are almost always initiated too late to do any good. This chart, based on recession timelines from the National Bureau of Economic Research, shows the enactment of stimulus plans is a fairly accurate indicator that we have hit the bottom of the business cycle, meaning the economy will improve even if the government does nothing.

from the New York Times


My thoughts: The recession began in December 2007. The stimulus will pass in February 2009. Congress doesn't let much slip by them. The economy could potentially start the recovery phase as early as March, April, or May 2009. Too little, too late.

TARP: Round 2 $356 Billion and Lags

2009: 29.0
2010: 115.8
2011: 105.5
2012: 53.6
2013: 26.5
2014: 13.0
2015: 6.9
2016: 3.0
2017: 1.6
2018: 0.9
2019:0.4

Total: $356.0 billion

from CBO

My thoughts: Congresss screams we must do something now. Yet, the majority of the spending occurs after the recession in projected to be over.

Cartoon: Stimulus Package

Fiscal Policy Lag

The history of anti-recession efforts is that they are almost always initiated too late to do any good. This chart, based on recession timelines from the National Bureau of Economic Research, shows the enactment of stimulus plans is a fairly accurate indicator that we have hit the bottom of the business cycle, meaning the economy will improve even if the government does nothing. — Bruce Bartlett, author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.”

from the New York Times