Keep the (Fiscal) Pedal to the Metal

And the thing to the floor...

The stimulus bill passed in February was somewhat a watered-down compromise at the time, and the recession has since proven even worse than expected. Brad DeLong amended a chart made by CEA chair Christina Romer and Biden economic advisor Jared Bernstein during the stimulus debate. He writes:

So my first point is that the Obama administration's federal fiscal stimulus programmes are on the low side of what is appropriate by a substantial margin. This is the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression and the standard tools of expansionary monetary policy are tapped out and broken right now.

My second, related point is that the need for federal-level fiscal expansion is reinforced by what state governments are doing right now. The federal government's discretionary actions are expanding aggregate demand by about $400 billion over fiscal year 2010, but state governments are right now cutting their spending and raising their taxes in order to offset this federal fiscal expansion more or less completely. On net, the government sector will be on autopilot as far as discretionary policy moves to stimulate the economy are concerned: federal-level expansion is offset and neutralised by state-level fiscal contraction. This is not an appropriate macroeconomic policy stance: this is the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

That is from his contribution to a roundtable discussion at The Economist of a column by Romer in which she revisits the recession that interrupted the recovery from the Great Depression in 1937. She writes:

The recovery from the Depression is often described as slow because America did not return to full employment until after the outbreak of the second world war. But the truth is the recovery in the four years after Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933 was incredibly rapid. Annual real GDP growth averaged over 9%. Unemployment fell from 25% to 14%. The second world war aside, the United States has never experienced such sustained, rapid growth.

However, that growth was halted by a second severe downturn in 1937-38, when unemployment surged again to 19% (see chart). The fundamental cause of this second recession was an unfortunate, and largely inadvertent, switch to contractionary fiscal and monetary policy.

Therefore,

The 1937 episode provides a cautionary tale. The urge to declare victory and get back to normal policy after an economic crisis is strong. That urge needs to be resisted until the economy is again approaching full employment. Financial crises, in particular, tend to leave scars that make financial institutions, households and firms behave differently. If the government withdraws support too early, a return to economic decline or even panic could follow. In this regard, not only should we not prematurely stop Recovery Act spending, we need to plan carefully for its expiration. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Recovery Act will provide nearly $400 billion of stimulus in the 2010 fiscal year, but just over $130 billion in 2011. This implies a fiscal contraction of about 2% of GDP. If all goes well, private demand will have increased enough by then to fill the gap. If that is not the case, broad policy support may need to be sustained somewhat longer.

It sounds like she is laying the groundwork to follow DeLong's advice. That may be hard to pull off, politically, as Andrew Leonard notes polls show concern about the federal deficit (as they did in 1935 and 36, Krugman points out).

In his column, Paul Krugman also argued it is not the time to let up:

The debate over economic policy has taken a predictable yet ominous turn: the crisis seems to be easing, and a chorus of critics is already demanding that the Federal Reserve and the Obama administration abandon their rescue efforts. For those who know their history, it’s déjà vu all over again — literally.

For this is the third time in history that a major economy has found itself in a liquidity trap, a situation in which interest-rate cuts, the conventional way to perk up the economy, have reached their limit. When this happens, unconventional measures are the only way to fight recession.

Yet such unconventional measures make the conventionally minded uncomfortable, and they keep pushing for a return to normalcy. In previous liquidity-trap episodes, policy makers gave in to these pressures far too soon, plunging the economy back into crisis. And if the critics have their way, we’ll do the same thing this time.

Update (6/21): Catherine Rampell of Economix puts those poll results in perspective:

2009’s federal deficit is projected to be a larger percentage of G.D.P. (12 or 13 percent) than it has been any year since 1945, and yet a measly 5 percent of Americans are complaining that deficit/debt/budget issues are the country’s biggest problem.