Injecting Sanity in the Debt and Deficit Debate

Dean Baker in a post on his Beat the Press blog tries to inject some facts into the braying hysteria over debts and deficits in Washington:

Given the deficit obsession of the Washington media it is remarkable that none of the reporters covering Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke's press conference noted the fact that he offered little help on dealing with the budget deficit. There were two obvious steps that he could have taken.

First, the main reason that the deficit has soared in the last few years is that the economy collapsed following the bursting of the housing bubble, which Bernanke apparently failed to see. (We are a very forgiving lot in Washington.) If the unemployment rate was brought down quickly by more aggressive monetary policy, then the deficit could be reduced by an enormous amount.

In 1996, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected a deficit of almost $250 billion (@ 2.6 percent of GDP) for the 2000 fiscal year. The country actually had a budget surplus of almost the same size in fiscal 2000, representing a shift from deficit to surplus in the year 2000 of more than 5 percentage points of GDP.

Congress did not approve any major tax increases in this 4-year period, nor were there any major unscheduled cuts to spending. Rather this shift from deficit to surplus of more than 5 percentage points of GDP ($750 billion in today's economy) was attributable almost entirely to better than expected economic performance.

In 1996 CBO projected that the unemployment rate would be 6.0 percent in 2000. Unemployment actually averaged just 4.0 percent. This was due to the fact that Alan Greenspan ignored the overwhelming consensus in the economics profession and allowed the unemployment rate to fall below the conventionally accepted levels of the NAIRU.

This decision, which was made over the objections of the Clinton appointees to the Fed, allowed millions of more people to get jobs than would have otherwise been the case. It also allowed strong wage growth for people at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution as their labor was then in demand. And it reduced the budget deficit. Because Bernanke offered little hope of more aggressive Fed actions to reduce unemployment, he is not offering any similar growth dividend on the budget deficit.

The other potential help that Bernanke is not offering is holding large amounts of government debt. The Fed now holds close to $3 trillion in government debt and other assets. If it continued to hold this debt throughout the decade, rather than selling it back to the private sector, it would reduce interest payments by close to $1.5 trillion over the course of the decade. It could deal with any inflationary pressures resulting from these holdings by simply raising reserve requirements. Bernanke is not offering this help either.

It would have been useful to readers to point out what the Fed is not doing to help address the deficit.

I appreciate Baker's effort. But the fanatics in Washington aren't listening to him. Instead, the usual nabobs of negativity on the right hold centre stage.

Sadly Obama listened to the "insiders" who helped create the financial crisis instead of those who had clean hands. But Obama felt "obligated" to listen to his Wall Street advisors since they were his biggest campaign financers. Who says money can't buy happiness?

Oh... and while we are on hanky-panky, lies, and political skullduggery, here's another post by Baker that merits attention:

Business reporters seem to have very bad memories. All of the media accounts of Federal Reserve Board Chairman's first press conference touted his commitment to Fed transparency.

These reporters are apparently too young to remember that the Fed strongly resisted giving out any information about the trillions of dollars of below market loans that it disbursed at the peak of the financial crisis. It only released this information when a coalition of conservative and progressive members of Congress, led by Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders, attached a provision requiring the release to the Dodd-Frank bill. Bernanke had claimed that releasing the information would jeopardize the stability of the financial system.

Bernanke also went to court to block the release of information about discount window borrowing from the Fed. He only gave up and released the requested data after all his legal options were exhausted. The description of Bernanke as unquestioned advocate of increased Fed transparency is wrong.

Funny how the media falls over itself to report sexual infidelity but doesn't find lies and deception by the head of the Federal Reserve worthy of any column inches.