Gee. Could that be because nearly all economists on the igm panel are neokeynesians? There's an unfortunate "where your bread is buttered" aspect to this that gets forgotten along the way. Think about where most economists are employed, then think again about how this might just skew things in terms of classical (or neoclassical) versus keynesian (or neokeynesian) thinking. It's nearly impossible to get a job teaching economic in a university in the US if you don't subscribe to some form of keynesian ideology.
What's amusing is when we look historically at these things rather than forward. The predictions are always "this wont work, we must do that!", but it's startling how often, when we do manage to do exactly that which these "expert" economists tell us
not to do, our economy flourishes. It's also equally startling how often, when we do exactly
what they tell us to do, our economy sputters along.
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The GOP is sold this under pollyanna growth predictions, and when those growth predictions fail, they will switch to a rhetoric of "starve the beast" claiming they intended the debt to balloon to force spending cuts. All of this is contrary to the plain jane interpretation of conservative fiscal policy. This is literally liberal (small "l") economics.
Ok. But surely you can grasp that "failing to match predictions" is not the same as "actually failing". When the growth predictions do come to pass, you'll never look backwards and say "gee. Maybe they had the right idea". You'll move the goalposts instead. You'll ignore gdp growth and look at unemployment. Or you'll ignore unemployment and look at inflation. Or ignore those and look at trade balances. Or... or.... or... Or my favorite one where they'll ignore economic indicators entirely and insist that out government not spending enough money on social services means the "economy is in the dumps" (remember back in 2004-2005 time period when this was the argument?).
There's always some negative you can find if you ignore the big picture and look really hard for just that one thing you can paint negatively.
EDIT: Oh. I'll also point out that you are repeating an often misstated interpretation of "conservative fiscal policy", where the focus is in reducing or eliminating deficits, period. The reality is that it matters
how the deficit is created. Deficits generated via increased spending falls into the heading of "racking up a debt that the public must pay". Deficits generated via decreased taxes does not fall into the same category, because the debt was already there in the form of the increased spending in the first place. Whether we pay via higher taxes or higher debt doesn't matter, but if the debt is higher and this creates pressure to cut spending in the future, it's a positive from a fiscal conservative point of view (the whole "starve the beast" line of thinking).
The really perverse misapplication of fiscal conservatism is to demand that fiscal conservatives should be ok with increasing taxes to pay down debt. Yet, I run into this idea all the time. Again, usually couched in some kind of "don't you guys care about reducing the deficit?" argument. Um... No. That's not it at all. The primary focus of fiscal conservatism is to reduce the economic footprint of the government on the people. Period. That means minimal spending, and thus minimal taxes to pay for that spending. Anything that pushes us in that direction is good from a fiscal conservative point of view.
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gbaji wrote:
We're already seeing gdp growth rates that are somewhere between double and triple what we saw during Obama's administration.
No we are not.
Yeah. Look at the first two quarters of 2017, and compare to the 4 year averages over the past. You can't compare the four year average at the end of that chart, because it includes some really crappy gdp growth at the tail end of the Obama administration. That trend (3% gdp growth or higher) has continued through the entire last year, where it's only hit a couple times (as a trend) over the entire 8 years of Obama. Obviously, we can't use this relatively small amount of data to predict accurately what will come, but the start certainly does look promising.
What's strange is that you produced data, but didn't seem to bother to do any analysis on it. Again, it's hard to get a good handle on this with the data set you included, since it only has two quarters we could even remotely label as "Trump's". Even then though, it's a positive sign.
Edited, Feb 16th 2018 6:59pm by gbaji