Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Mason's # 5: The Size of the Debt and Deficit Don't Matter

I completely agree with Mason on this one. 

There is just not much solid evidence to support the common public perception that government borrowing makes much difference to anything. This is just cheap talk on the part of deficit hawks.

The critical point here is Ricardian equivalence. Government debt is just a promise of future taxes. So the tradeoff is between paying for government with current taxes or future taxes. And it seems to me that for most people ... taxes are taxes.

What I draw from that is that we should argue a lot more about whether the government spending is a good idea or a bad one, and a lot less about how we pay for it. And yeah, there's a lot of dumb stuff in the "Biden stimulus package", like bailouts for underfunded pensions run by states and municipalities.

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On the other hand, the huge point that everyone in our legacy media and political arena miss is that what's important is not government debt but whether you can make payments on the debt you have. No country gets into trouble with their debt until they stop paying their debtholders in a timely fashion. The U.S. has never done that. What we should be worried about is how they are going to afford that flow of payments, particularly if interest rates rise and bonds need to be refinanced.

Do note that Larry Summers has made this point strongly, and used it to support more traditional Democratic fiscal policy. His point is that as interest rates get lower, the costs of expansionary fiscal policy drop. In this vein, right now is a good time to go big. 

Of course, Summers has been pushed out of these debates by saying something along the lines of "I didn't mean that big".

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