Keynesian economists blame the sluggish US growth and lack of job creation on the insufficiency of stimulus measures. If only Congress had agreed with President Obama to greater stimulus, they say, the current US recovery would have been much stronger. This is a dubious proposition. The deeper problem lay in the limitations of fiscal stimulus as a response to the 2008 crisis.
Stimulus spending has been sizeable. According to the International Monetary Fund’s measurement of these things, the fiscal stimulus has been large and persistent. The IMF looks at “general government structural balance as a percent of potential GDP,” which measures the general government budget balance net of automatic stabilisers — spending that kicks in during downturns, such as unemployment benefit. In 2007, the structural deficit was 2.8 per cent of gross domestic product. This rose to 5.0 per cent of GDP in 2008, mainly because of tax cuts implemented by the Bush administration at the onset of the crisis. With Mr Obama’s stimulus program, the structural deficit rose further to 7.5 per cent of GDP in 2009, and stayed at roughly that level through 2011.
Thus, the structural fiscal expansion was more than 4 per cent of GDP on a sustained basis during 2009-11 compared with 2007. The actual deficit including automatic stabilisers and the Troubled Asset Relief Program (bank bailout) funds was far larger, rising from 2.7 per cent of GDP in 2007 to 13.0 percent of GDP in 2009, 10.5 percent of GDP in 2010, and 9.6 percent of GDP in 2011. Net public debt as a share of GDP soared from 48.2 per cent of GDP in 2007 to 80.3 per cent of GDP in 2011, according to IMF data.