Working in Washington is a frustrating experience for many reasons, but my personal nightmare is that bad ideas refuse to die. Keynesian economics is a perfect example. It doesn’t matter that Keynesian deficit spending didn’t work for Hoover and Roosevelt. It doesn’t matter that it didn’t work for the Japanese all through the 1990s. It doesn’t matter that it didn’t work for Bush in 2008. And it doesn’t matter that it hasn’t worked for Obama. The statists simply shrug their shoulders and say there wasn’t enough spending. Or that the economy would have been even worse without all the so-called stimulus. With this in mind, I was initially excited to read Kevin Hassett’s obituary for Keynesianism, but then I sobered up and realized that evidence is not enough to win this debate. Like a vampire or a Freddy Krueger movie, the bad guy (or bad idea) keeps getting resurrected. So while Kevin’s article is very compelling, I don’t expect that it will stop politicians from doing the wrong thing in the future.
…some Keynesians who supported Barack Obama’s $862 billion stimulus now claim it fell short of their goals not because the idea was flawed, but because the spending package was too small. Christina Romer, the departing chairman of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, has become a minor cult hero to the Keynesians, thanks to news reports that said her analysis in 2009 suggested the stimulus should be in the range of $1.2 trillion, or 40 percent larger than it turned out to be.
The notion that a much-larger U.S. stimulus would have been more successful isn’t backed up by evidence. Maybe there would be an argument if some countries were now booming because their stimulus packages were larger. Or if some previous U.S. administration had tried a bigger stimulus and had better luck.
The fact is, the U.S. stimulus was the largest among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the biggest ever tried in the U.S.
Nor does the academic literature support what we might call these Not-Enough Keynesians.
A 2002 study by economists Richard Hemming, Selma Mahfouz and Axel Schimmelpfennig of recessions in 27 developed economies from 1971 to 1998 found that increased spending by government had, in almost all cases, a barely noticeable impact, and sometimes a negative one. Heavily indebted countries that spent more in recessions grew about 0.5 percent less, relative to trend, than countries that didn’t, the study found.
…Supporters of this type of stimulus are either unfamiliar with the literature or willing to ignore it. The result is policy that is harmful to our country and inconsistent with modern economic science. If the Obama economic team were medical doctors, they would be pushing the use of medicine not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
As the economic data again head south, it will be much harder to devise successful economic policies because of the budgetary hole that the Keynesians have dug for us.
In all likelihood, the data will soon be so convincingly bad that we’ll again debate the need for an economic stimulus. Let’s hope that when that begins, all will finally concede that the ideas of John Maynard Keynes are as dead as the man himself, and that Keynesianism is the real voodoo economics.
