I was a bit critical of Laura Tyson’s New York Times article on “Why We Need a Second Stimulus.” Apparently I wasn’t nearly critical enough.
The Nation and National Public Radio are advising President Obama to “stop listening to infrastructure-phobic advisers like Larry Summers and start taking counsel from Laura Tyson, a member of his Economic Recovery Advisory Board who argues that $1 trillion in infrastructure investment is needed over the next five years.”
At The Atlantic, senior editor (and Boston Globe columnist) Joshua Green thinks Laura Tyson’s article “underscored what a loss it is for the Obama administration that it couldn’t manage to find a place for her on its economic team.” Mr. Green can’t imagine why a Berkeley professor who wants to add an extra trillion to federal spending wouldn’t be the ideal budget director.
In the article that so impressed Mr. Green, Tyson wrote, “The primary cause of the [current] labor market crisis is a collapse in private demand… By late 2009, in response to unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus, household and business spending began to recover. But by the second quarter of this year, economic growth had slowed to 1.6 percent.”
Combining “fiscal and monetary stimulus” in a single phrase is a clumsy way to conceal the irrelevance of “fiscal stimulus” (debt-financed federal spending) to GDP growth in 2009. Fiscal stimulus means the Treasury sells more bonds. Monetary stimulus means the Fed buys more bonds. To discuss those transactions as if they had the same effect is just another mysterious Keynesian incantation.
Tyson claims there is “too little appreciation for how stimulus spending has helped stabilize the economy and how more of the right kind of government spending could boost job creation and economic growth.” She wants much more spending on unemployment benefits (a paradoxical definition of a jobs program) and on aid to state and local governments (where unemployment rates are relatively low).