by EUGENE F. FAMA
In his NY Times blog Paul Krugman attacks my piece on the stimulus plan.
Again, here is my argument in three sentences.
1. Bailouts and stimulus plans must be financed.
2. If the financing takes the form of additional government debt, the added debt displaces other uses of the same funds.
3. Thus, stimulus plans only enhance incomes when they move resources from less productive to more productive uses.
Are any of these statements incorrect?
In his attack on me Krugman implicitly assumes that sentence 3 above is true; that is, the stimulus plan will on balance move resources from less productive to more productive uses. This is indeed the focus of the issue. But the answer with respect to an $825 billion stimulus plan (whose details will be subject to lots of political pressures) is more than a little debatable.
Here are two interesting links on the stimulus that come to conclusions similar to mine.
From Robert Barro, "Government Spending Is No Free Lunch."
From John Cochrane, "Fiscal Stimulus, Fiscal Inflation, or Fiscal Fallacies?"
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