The sheer audacity (and vagueness) of Senator Sanders’ economic program means that there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding impacts: wholesale replacement of ACA, rapid increases in marginal tax rates, rapidly escalating infrastructure spending, among others. Here’s CRFB’s estimate of the impact on debt-to-GDP.
Category Archives: budget
What Is “Solid Economic Reasoning”?
Writing in The Nation, Robert Pollin asserts:
All of [Bernie Sanders’s] major proposals are grounded in solid economic reasoning and evidence.
What Is the Assumed Output Gap in the Friedman Projections?
Or, “Is current output really 18% below potential output?”
The Counter-cyclical Stabilization Policies of the Democratic Presidential Candidates
In this post, I assess how the candidates would implement macroeconomic stabilization policy, given the big reform packages proposed by the candidates, in particular those by Senator Sanders, are highly unlikely to be passed by a fully or partly Republican Congress. On the other hand, a downturn in the next four years is much more plausible; hence, knowing the candidates’ views on macro stabilization policy is arguably more relevant.
Speaker Ryan Assesses Fiscal and Monetary Policy Efficacy
From The Hill:
Instead of crediting Obama for any of the economic gains that have occurred in the last seven years, Ryan argued that the Fed’s policies pushed the recovery. He added that the central bank’s controversial efforts to drive down borrowing costs may have driven growth, but the benefits failed to spread to everyone.
Assessing the Counter-cyclical Macro Policies of the Great Recession
There are at least two ways of proceeding. One could repeat the following mantra endlessly:
[T]he government taxes or borrows the resources used to build infrastructure projects. Government spending crowds resources out from the rest of the economy. More federal spending comes at the expense of a smaller private sector.
These factors explain why the 2009 stimulus failed. So did Japan’s decade-long attempt to stimulate its economy through infrastructure projects. The Japanese wound up with massive debt, superhighways in underpopulated rural districts—and an anemic economy.
What’s a Debt Limit?
From Marketplace, an interview with Ben Carson:
The Return of Policy Uncertainty
From Hatzius et al., in Goldman Sachs Global Macro Research yesterday:
A federal shutdown due to a funding lapse looks no less likely than it did two weeks ago, and we believe the probability is nearly 50%. The Senate is expected to begin voting later this week on a funding extension, but the House looks unlikely to act until shortly before the September 30 deadline.
Government Debt Crowding Out Watch, Fall 2015
As I updated my slides for teaching an economics course on the financial system at UW-Madison, I recreated this graph, which depicts the rise in Federal debt as a share of GDP, and the trajectory of real interest rates, as proxied by several measures.
Short Term Implications of the House Budget
The CBO took at face value the revenue and spending levels in the House Budget, FY2016, and assessed the impact on GNP per capita (remember, this is not a score, as there are few details on specific provisions to hit the targets). The impact is shown in Figure 2 from the CBO.