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Steve Pierson over at the Standard is criticising National’s stimulus package, and the quality of economic journalism. Now, although I’m always happy to criticise things too I feel that some of his critiques are a bit harsh. I’ll go through the two harshest criticisms below:
On this fine Waitangi day, Marginal Revolution mentions that Ireland is actually cutting spending in the face of a deteriorating economic climate. Tyler Cowen gives a few reasons why this may be the way to go for Ireland: A few things are worth noting. First, a small open economy has a harder time making fiscal […]
If we have to have a stimulus package in New Zealand (because the government feels it HAS to do something), then maybe they could have a stimulus for bloggers. The case is made here (ht Marginal Revolution). It is a 14 point argument – so it must be right! I would add that there is […]
Greg Mankiw has made an implicit call that there are long lags to infrastructural policy – and therefore such policy seems difficult to justify as a short-term stimulus (Anti-Dismal and Kiwiblog also link to this approvingly). Now this is a very fair point, however I was initially going to criticise it on the simple ground […]
I noticed that the British government rejected the idea of a “wage subsidy” that was put forward by unions (who would have guessed 😉 ). Now, whenever a government outright rejects an idea I usually ask myself the question “how could that idea have worked” followed by “would that idea have worked”. In this case […]
Over at Economists View, Mark Thoma points out and, in my opinion, rightly criticises a piece from the Cato institute on fiscal stimulus. Now the Cato piece seems to equate a fiscal stimulus strictly with the “broken window fallacy“. I do not completely agree with this. As Thoma points out government investment should be counter-cyclical, […]