Courtesy of Henry Blodget of The Business Insider
Image: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection
We recently laid out what we believe is the fundamental problem with the US economy: Massive consumer debts are crippling consumer spending, which accounts for about 70% of our economy.
We noted that, to get the economy healthy again, consumers have to reduce their debts. We argued that this process will take significant time, probably another decade or two.
No one can wave a magic wand and make consumer debt go away. (If they could have, they would have). So the question is what the government can do in the meantime to help the debt-reduction process along and lessen the economic pain.
One answer to the second question—how the government can lessen the pain—is that the government can increase its spending to offset the lost consumer spending. The economy is basically composed of three big spending engines —consumers, corporations (investment), and governments—so when the first two weaken, the third can help offset this weakness.
When governments spend money well, moreover—such as on infrastructure projects that benefit all citizens—the impact of this spending lasts far beyond the years in which the money is spent. Roads, bridges, schools, airports, national broadband networks, and other investments can improve the country for decades.
But ever since the original 2009 stimulus "failed to fix the economy," the consensus in the US has been that government stimulus doesn’t work.
For further evidence supporting this conclusion, everyone points to Japan, where the government has been frantically "stimulating" the economy for two decades now, and the Great Depression, with its massive public-works programs.
(There’s another key question here, of course, which is whether we can afford more government stimulus, given our ~$14 trillion of government debt and gaping budget deficit. That’s a very important question, and it’s one to address in the coming days. But it’s a different question than "Does stimulus help?" And it’s the latter question that is the focus here.)
But there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the impact of government stimulus, specifically infrastructure stimulus, is being badly misunderstood.
Think Japan’s stimulus has failed? Look at what it would have done without government intervention (red line).
Image: Richard Koo
Observers of Japan, for example, conclude that obviously stimulus doesn’t work —or Japan’s economy would be robustly healthy again. But the work of economist Richard Koo suggests that Japan’s stimulus has been vastly more successful than is commonly believed.
Far from not working, Koo argues, Japan’s government stimulus has kept Japan’s economy alive for the past 20 years. Without the stimulus, Koo says, Japan’s economy would not have crawled along for the last two decades—it would have collapsed.
When the same logic is applied to the US stimulus of 2009-2010, the conclusion would be not that the stimulus "failed to fix" the US economy, but that it kept the recession from being much worse.
In addition to Japan, one of the most often-repeated examples cited by those who say stimulus doesn’t work is the US experience in the Great Depression. To see that stimulus doesn’t work, they say, all you need to do is look at the huge public-works programs of the 1930s, which failed to pull the US permanently out of the Depression. What finally got the US out of the Depression, these folks continue, was World War 2.
World War 2: The biggest Keynesian stimulus ever.
But what was World War 2 if not a gigantic government stimulus on an unimaginable scale?
Nothing—that’s exactly what World War 2 was. It put the US government deeply in debt, vastly deeper in debt than we are today. But it got our production engine humming again, and it set the stage for decades of impressive growth, during which we eventually worked off the World War 2 debt.
So there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that the current consensus that stimulus "doesn’t work" is flat-out wrong. In fact, the evidence suggests, stimulus can keep the economy from collapsing while the private sector heals itself.
And this, in turn, suggests that ruling out future stimulus in the form of infrastructure investment as a way to help the economy is a major mistake, especially with US infrastructure in such lousy shape and so many US workers idled by the construction industry slowdown.
To begin to believe this, it helps to walk through some of Richard Koo’s excellent slides, which focus on the Japan, Depression, and recent US and Europe experiences…
