Why the Stimulus Failed by Brian Riedl - National Review Online
Conservatives have correctly declared President Obama’s $787 billion “stimulus” a flop. In a January report, White House economists predicted the bill would create (not merely save) 3.3 million jobs. Since then, 2.8 million jobs have been lost, pushing unemployment toward 10 percent.
Yet few have explained correctly why the stimulus failed. By blaming the slow pace of stimulus spending (even though it’s ahead of schedule), many conservatives have accepted the premise that government spending stimulates the economy. Their thinking implies that we should have spent much more by now.
History proves otherwise. In 1939, after a doubling of federal spending failed to relieve the Great Depression, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau said that “we have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work. . . . After eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started . . . and an enormous debt to boot!” Japan made the same mistake in the 1990s (building the largest government debt in the industrial world), and the United States is making it today.
This repeated failure has nothing to do with the pace or type of spending. Rather, the problem is found in the oft-repeated Keynesian myth that deficit spending “injects new dollars into the economy,” thereby increasing demand and spurring economic growth. According to this theory, government spending adds money to the economy, taxes remove money, and the budget deficit represents net new dollars injected. Therefore, it scarcely matters how the dollars are spent. John Maynard Keynes famously asserted that a government program paying people to dig and then refill ditches would provide new income for those workers to spend and circulate through the economy, creating even more jobs and income. Today, lawmakers cling to estimates by Mark Zandi of Economy.com that on average, $1 in new deficit spending expands the economy by roughly $1.50.
If that were true, the record $1.6 trillion in deficit spending over the past fiscal year would have already overheated the economy. Yet despite this spending, which is equal to fully 9 percent of GDP, the economy is expected to shrink by at least 3 percent this fiscal year. If the spending constitutes an injection of “new money” into the economy, we may conclude that, without it, the economy would contract 12 percent — hardly a plausible claim.