Marshall Auerback is a Denver, Colorado-based global portfolio strategist for RAB Capital plc and a Fellow with the Economists for Peace and Security (http://www.epsusa.org/). He is a frequent contributor to the blog, Credit Writedowns, and the Japan Policy Research Institute (www.jpri.org):
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Government Spending is the Solution–Not the Problem
By MARSHALL AUERBACK
Tens of thousands of people marched to the U.S. Capitol on Sunday, carrying signs with slogans such as “Obamacare makes me sick” as they protested the president’s health care plan and our so-called “out-of-control spending”. The marchers were chanting “enough, enough” and “We the People.” Others, channeling their inner Joe Wilson, screamed “You lie, you lie!” while waving U.S. flags and the now omnipresent images of Obama as Hitler, Obama as the Joker, along with the usual placards decrying the “march to socialism”.
And the reaction against the expansion of the state is by no means restricted to America. According to the London Sunday Times, voters are overwhelmingly in favor of cutting public spending rather than tax rises to close the budget “black hole”. Sixty per cent want to shrink the size of the state to curb the £175 billion deficit amid mounting government disarray over the public finances. Naturally, there is also growing support for this line of thinking in the financial community, despite having successfully received tens of trillions of dollars, even for deeply insolvent financial institutions. The large banks and brokers lobbied for special treatment and got it.
To the extent that government spending is being used to prop up these economic zombies, I sympathize with the prevailing orthodoxy about wastage of our money. However, the fasct remains that the principle opposition to increased government spending is predicated on the simplistic notions about fiscal activism. We need to get past the deficit myths and wrongheaded notions of “national solvency” so that we can move forward in other areas. In the words of economist Bill Mitchell of the University of Newcastle, Australia:
“Within a modern monetary economy, as a matter of national accounting, the sovereign government deficit (surplus) equals the non-government surplus (deficit)…In aggregate, there can be no net savings of financial assets of the non-government sector without cumulative government deficit spending. The sovereign government via net spending (deficits) is the only entity that can provide the non-government sector with financial assets (net savings) and thereby simultaneously accommodate any net desire to save and hence eliminate unemployment.”
A seemingly growing populist drive toward a return to fiscal orthodoxy follows a stream of similar pronouncements from Wall Street, the Fed, the European Central Bank, the OECD, all of whom are legitimizing a campaign against further public spending and mobilizing support for “exit strategies” as they confidently pronounce the end of the recession. Implicit is the view that somewhere along the line ongoing government involvement in the “free market” reaches a tipping point where fiscal “intrusions” no longer act as a stabilizing force, but serve to impede the natural tendency of the market to equilibrate to recovery. The major hypothesis is that anytime the government is involved in the economy, eventually things go bad. But markets do not self-regulate in ways that avoid major financial upheavals and activist government is required as a counterbalancing force.
President Obama himself has legitimized this line of thinking himself, committing himself to the goal of “fiscal sustainability” (whatever that means) as a medium term policy objective. He said as much last Wednesday again during his speech on health care. Having failed to understand what got us into the crisis, and equally having failed to appreciate the extent to which government spending actually prevented an economic catastrophe along the lines of the Great Depression, our policy makers who are championing this move toward neo-liberal fiscal orthodoxy are almost certain to drive us into the next recession if they take these demands to shrink government too aggressively.
Deficit hawks fail to understand that not all debt is created equally. As James Galbraith, L. Randall Wray and Warren Mosler have argued, there is no legitimate analogy to be drawn about the budgets of the government, which issues the currency, and the budgets of the non-government sector (households, firms etc) which uses that currency. The former does not have a financial constraint and can spend freely whereas the latter has to “finance” all spending either through earning income, drawing down savings or liquidating assets.
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