Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, is in big trouble. It turns out that a medium-sized industrialized democracy like the UK can be run in pretty much the same way as a traditional emerging market – fiscal irresponsibility (cyclically-adjusted general government deficit now forecast at 12.2 percent of GDP for 2010) gives you a boom for a while, but the eventual day of reckoning is economically painful and politically disastrous. If you also need to deal with an oversized bubble finance sector, that makes the adjustment even more painful.
It is of course sensible to use fiscal stimulus to offset a fall in private demand, and to some extent this can be effective – with a lag. But if you lose control over public spending and borrow too heavily (helped by the fact people like to hold your currency), it ends badly.
From the beginning, we’ve expressed concern here that the entire Summers Plan was overweight fiscal, i.e., not enough resources for recapitalizing banks and addressing housing directly (for the context of this assessment, see our full baseline view). Back in December/January, this was a strategic choice worth arguing about; now it’s a done deal and following the (very) limited recapitalization outcome of the bank stress tests, it seems likely that household and firm spending will remain sluggish. If that is the case, the Administration’s logic implies throwing another big fiscal stimulus into the mix – and the Summers’ team is already preparing the groundwork.
The IMF is now warning against the risks of this approach, albeit using carefully worded language. Continue reading →
My Medicare Deficit Solution
By James Kwak
David Brooks, perhaps realizing that it was a bad idea to swallow a politician’s PR bullet points whole, is now backpedaling. The Ryan Plan, which he originally hailed as “the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes,” now has the principal virtue of existing: “Because he had the courage to take the initiative, Paul Ryan’s budget plan will be the starting point for future discussions.”
As I’ve discussed before, the Ryan Plan is just one bad idea dressed up with the false precision of lots of numbers: changing Medicare from a health insurance program to a cash redistribution program that gives up on managing health care costs. Here’s the key chart from the CBO report:
Continue reading →
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Posted in Commentary, Debt
Tagged fiscal policy, health care, Medicare, taxes