Main Ideas
1. Fiscal Policy Definition: Fiscal policy is a legitimate tool that governments use to manage economic fluctuations through changes in spending and taxation.
2. Business Cycle Fluctuations: The economy experiences cycles of boom and bust, represented by recessionary and inflationary gaps where actual output diverges from potential GDP.
3. Consequences of Economic Gaps: High unemployment during recessions can lead to severe social issues, while inflation can erode savings and stoke unrest.
4. Tools of Fiscal Policy: When the economy is slow, governments can implement expansionary fiscal policy by increasing spending or cutting taxes to stimulate growth.
5. Contractionary Fiscal Policy: To manage inflation, governments may need to reduce spending or raise taxes, which is less common due to political backlash.
6. Debate on Effectiveness: The effectiveness of fiscal policy in stimulating the economy remains a hotly debated topic, with arguments on both sides regarding its consequences.
7. Keynesian Economics: John Maynard Keynes advocated for government intervention during downturns, asserting that fiscal policy can mitigate the adverse effects of reduced consumer spending.
8. Crowding Out Effect: Excessive government borrowing can lead to crowding out, where rising interest rates reduce private sector investment.
9. Multiplier Effect: Government spending can create a ripple effect in the economy, potentially yielding more total spending than the initial amount spent.
10. Political Challenges: The implementation of fiscal policy often faces political hurdles and perceptions, affecting confidence in economic recovery.
Quotes
1. "Fiscal policy is a completely legitimate tool used by non-shadowy government officials to correct fluctuations in the economy."
2. "When actual output is below potential, economists call it a recessionary gap."
3. "High unemployment rates have been linked to higher suicide rates, more domestic violence, and social upheaval."
4. "The government can step on the gas or the brake by changing government spending or taxes."
5. "That's called expansionary fiscal policy...the idea is that government spending creates jobs and increases income."
6. "The big question here is: Does fiscal policy actually work?"
7. "In the long run, we are all dead." — John Maynard Keynes
8. "Deficit spend; they need to spend more money than they collect in tax revenue."
9. "The multiplier effect...the initial increase in government spending...might turn out to be $175 worth of actual spending in the economy."
10. "Doing nothing doesn't create the kind of confidence that will get consumers and businesses spending again."
Transcript
Today, we peer into a world where shadowy government stooges manipulate the levers of fiscal policy from deep in their evil lairs. They pick economic winners and losers and control the business cycle, creating recessions and controlling inflation to serve their nefarious purposes.
Nah, fiscal policy is a completely legitimate tool used by non-shadowy government officials to correct fluctuations in the economy.
In previous videos, we discussed the business cycle and how the economy goes up and down over time. This line represents the economy's potential GDP, the maximum sustainable amount that the economy will produce in the long run. But the business cycle shows that the economy isn't always at its potential. When actual output is below potential, economists call it a recessionary gap. Workers are unemployed, and factories are sitting unused. Sometimes, actual output can briefly rise above potential. Economists call this an inflationary gap. Unemployment is super low, and factories are working overtime, but it's not sustainable. Eventually, producers will bid up the price of scarce resources, and higher costs will lead to more inflation rather than more output.
Real-life fluctuations are not as predictable as the business cycle might suggest, but every modern industrialized economy sees times of boom and bust. You know, you get your Empire Strikes Back, and you get your Phantom Menace.
So, let's look at the real GDP growth rate in the United States since 1920. You see it go up and down over time. In the mid-1980s, things flattened out, and we had what was called the Great Moderation. It seemed like the days of deep recessions and high inflation were over. Then came the Great Recession, as a result of the 2008 financial crisis, plunging us back into the same old up and down of the business cycle.
Both recessionary and inflationary gaps cause serious problems. High unemployment when the economy is bad? That's bad — like, really bad — and not just for the economy, but for people. High unemployment rates have been linked to higher suicide rates, more domestic violence, and social upheaval. High inflation can be just as bad. Rising costs wipe out savings and have been the root of protests and riots throughout the world.
Well, this seems like a fun episode. Stan, what’s with all the doom and gloom? Isn’t there some way to smooth out these fluctuations? I’m going to answer my own question: there might be.
Many economists argue that policymakers should intervene in the macroeconomy to promote full employment or reduce inflation. Today, we are going to look at one of the ways to do this: fiscal policy.
The idea of fiscal policy is really simple: when the economy is going too slow or too fast, the government can step on the gas or the brake by changing government spending or taxes. In the United States, that's the job of Congress and the President.
When the economy falls into a deep recessionary gap, the government can increase government spending, cut taxes, or do some of both. That's called expansionary fiscal policy. The idea is that government spending creates jobs and increases income for construction workers, teachers, and other laborers. In turn, these workers spend more of their additional income, increasing consumer spending and boosting the entire economy.
Cutting taxes follows a similar logic. A tax cut increases disposable income for consumers, which in turn increases consumer spending and boosts the entire economy. This is exactly what the U.S. did in 2009 during the depths of the Great Recession. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a stimulus bill that added more than $800 billion to the economy. That stimulus was split 60-40 between new government spending and tax cuts, and the expansionary fiscal policy funded new roads and bridges and upgrades to the electric grid, creating jobs.
But when the economy faces an inflationary gap, the government can cut spending, raise taxes, or do some combination of the two. That's called contractionary fiscal policy, and that's not half as fun. The idea is that higher taxes will leave consumers with less money to spend, and lower government spending means fewer public jobs. All that should reduce consumer spending, cool off the economy, and reduce inflation.
We don't see contractionary fiscal policy very often in practice because politicians rarely want to hit their voters with a slower economy; it's a hard sell and could cost policymakers their jobs. U.S. President George H. W. Bush famously stated, “Read my lips, no new taxes,” while campaigning in 1988. A few years later, he agreed to raise taxes to reduce the debt and lost the election in 1992.
So, the big question here is: Does fiscal policy actually work? Does stimulating the economy with spending and tax cuts actually make the economy grow? That is the most heated debate in modern economics, and it’s been raging for decades. It’s been known to drive mild-mannered economists to use their loud voices on cable news shows.
Let’s learn about it in the Thought Bubble.
Classical theories assumed that the economy will fix itself in the long run, and that government intervention will, at best, lead to unintended consequences and, at worst, cause massive inflation and debt. These theories dominated policy decisions during the early years of the Great Depression, which saw little stimulus. Economists argued that unemployed workers would eventually accept lower wages, since some pay is better than no pay, and resource prices would eventually fall since fewer people were using them. Lower costs would lead to more production, more jobs, and poof, the economy is back on track.
At the time, many policymakers thought about a sick economy the way doctors a thousand years ago thought about a sick patient. The thinking was that problems resulted from accumulated imbalances that could be cured by aggressive purging. In the case of doctors, that meant bleeding their patients. In the case of a recession, it meant standing back and letting the economy bleed jobs and output until balance was restored.
Then entered British economist John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential and controversial economists of the 20th century. Keynes basically invented modern economics and developed theories and models about spending and production. He's the one who suggested using expansionary fiscal policy to speed up the economy. Keynes argued that government spending can make up for a decrease in consumer spending.
So even if the economy does self-correct in the long run, there's no reason to wait it out. His justification? “In the long run, we are all dead.” Well, Keynes died in 1946, but his theories live on, and so does the debate. Thanks, Thought Bubble.
At first glance, Keynesian policy seems like the perfect solution to fix a sluggish economy. If consumer spending falls, the government can spend instead. What's the harm in that? Well, the government needs to pay for all that spending. They can't just raise taxes to cover it because that would cause a decrease in consumer spending and defeat the purpose.
To stimulate the economy, the government needs to deficit spend; they need to spend more money than they collect in tax revenue. Now, to achieve this, the government needs to borrow money, which will result in debt. We are going to make a video about the national debt and different schools of economic thought, but for now, it's fair enough to say that the people who don't like Keynesian policy don't like it because it causes debt.
A more technical argument against deficit spending is that it leads to something called crowding out. If the government borrows a lot of money, that increases interest rates, making it harder for businesses to borrow money and buy things like factories and tools. This weakens the economy while increasing government debt.
But Keynesian economists maintain that crowding out is only a problem if the economy is operating at full capacity, where all workers are employed and we're producing as much as we can. In that case, since total output can't really rise, more government spending will result in less private spending. However, they argue that the situation is different when the economy is below capacity, with lots of unemployed workers and vacant factories.
In that case, more government spending can raise overall output by putting idle resources back to work. In fact, Keynesians will argue that government stimulus when the economy is below capacity can actually raise private spending. All those newly hired workers will start spending more money.
So how can we figure out who's right? We can start by comparing the actual performance of economies that receive stimulus to those that didn’t. As we mentioned, in 2009, the U.S. government launched a huge stimulus program in response to the financial crisis. Despite that, employment and GDP both fell. That sounds like a failure, but the majority of economists think that the situation would have been far, far worse without that stimulus.
While the U.S. was implementing stimulus, most European countries were doing the opposite — they were pursuing a policy called austerity, raising taxes and cutting government spending to reduce debt. Since 2011, when U.S. and European policies really started to diverge, the U.S. economy has grown at an average rate of 2.5 percent, while the Eurozone GDP actually shrank by 1 percent. U.S. unemployment fell to 5.5 percent, while Eurozone unemployment rose to 12 percent.
Another thing to keep in mind is that stimulus is complicated, and it’s hard to do well. One reason is because of this thing called the multiplier effect. The idea here is that the government spends $100, and the highway construction worker who got the money will save $50 and then spend $50 on a concert or something. The musician who got that money will save $25 and spend the other $25, and so on.
Because of this ripple effect, the initial increase in government spending of $100 might turn out to be $175 worth of actual spending in the economy. Economists would call this a multiplier of 1.75. But the question is, what’s the real multiplier of the United States economy? Economists have come up with a wide range of estimates for that multiplier, and it turns out that it depends on different situations.
When the economy is already booming, the multiplier seems to be close to 1. If everyone is already working and the government wants to build a road, they’re going to have to hire workers away from the private sector. Sure public sector output increases, but private sector output falls, and GDP is unchanged; it’s a wash.
But when the economy is in recession with lots of unemployed workers and unused capital, the multiplier is around 2. Due to that ripple effect, an increase of $100 of government spending would lead to about $200 of total spending, which puts some people back to work. Moreover, different policies have different multipliers.
Spending on welfare and unemployment seems to give us the biggest bang for our buck since people with low incomes would likely spend virtually all of their additional income. Spending on infrastructure and aid to state and local governments also seems to have a fairly high multiplier, about 1.5. But general cuts to payroll and income taxes seem to have a multiplier of about 1; if the government cuts $100 in taxes, the economy’s going to grow by about $100.
More targeted tax cuts and tax credits have lower multipliers since they tend to benefit those with higher incomes, who often save rather than spend additional income. What we want is something that will affect the economy rapidly but also have a high multiplier.
So, tax cuts put money in people's hands quickly, but that money might get saved rather than spent. On the other hand, infrastructure projects, like building roads and bridges, have strong multipliers, but they may take months or even years to complete.
Fiscal stimulus may be an important tool, at least when it comes to a recession, but it doesn't mean that it's easy to do or that all stimulus is created equal. Fiscal policy has its advantages and drawbacks. In the end, maybe it's all about that thing you didn't have when you were in sixth grade — confidence.
When people are miserable and unemployed, they want to feel like help is on the way. Doing nothing doesn't create the kind of confidence that will get consumers and businesses spending again, and it doesn't get politicians reelected.
So it looks like Keynes's policies are here to stay unless...