There’s a very interesting, albeit down-in-the-weeds, analytic debate brewing around a confluence of recent publications. Tim Geithner’s new book defends the interventions of the Treasury Department he led to reflate credit markets (and I worked with the team on this back then). Mian and Sufi’s new book, reviewed here by Bin Appelbaum, argues that Treasury… Read more
Archive for the ‘Recession/Stimulus’ Category
The Congressional Progressive Caucus Budget: A Vision for Our Time
To open our full employment event last week, Larry Summers presented an extremely compelling case for the importance of using fiscal policy to close our persistent output gaps, lower unemployment, and repair some of the economic damage resulting from “austerity,” i.e., reducing budget deficits in weak economies. At the same time Larry was presenting this… Read more
There Was More to the Stimulus than the Stimulus
I’ve been waiting for someone to collect these data, so imagine my nerdly joy when I saw the table 3-11 on page 140 of the new Economic Report of the President, reproduced below (click on the table to see larger version). There’s a misconception that the administration only pushed the Recovery Act and then gave… Read more
Lesson Learned (or Not) From the Recovery Act
Over at the NYT Economix blog, wherein I take the unusual step in Washington of not only touting what we did right in the stimulus bill from five years ago but what we might have done better. The radical idea here is that policy makers can learn from what worked and what might have worked… Read more
Some Smart, Progressive Budgeting From the White House
These troubled fiscal times are characterized by a few big problems: –too much fiscal drag from misplaced emphasis on deficit reduction in what’s still a weak recovery (with said weakness intimately related to said fiscal drag); –cuts that are too deep in non-defense discretionary programs that invest in everything from upward mobility for disadvantage kids,… Read more