King’s image of saddling “our grandchildren” with budget debt was challenged by Josh Bivens, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, a national progressive think tank. Bivens said future generations will likely fare worse if Congress fails to respond to the magnitude of the economic crisis caused by the pandemic and follows centrist senators’ demands to curtail deficit spending.
“I think the King formulation is super simplistic and really misguided right now,” Bivens told Beacon. “It is an absolute slam dunk that deficit financing another round of COVID relief will make our kids richer, not poorer.”
Bivens argued in a Jan. 14 blog that policymakers should ignore criticisms by some GOP “deficit hawks” who claim a substantial federal stimulus will “overheat” the economy — meaning an influx of federal money will crowd out private investment and drive up inflation and interest rates, ultimately leading to a decline in economic output. Bivens argues that economic overheating is far off.
“The U.S. economy has run far ‘too cold’ for decades, largely due to the enormous rise in income inequality redistributing income to richer households that save most of their income. Unless inequality is substantially reversed, economic overheating is highly unlikely,” he wrote, adding that Biden’s proposal “is highly unlikely to cause economic ‘overheating’ — and it would be a sign of its success if it did.”
Bivens has also previously explained how arguments about the deficit, such as King’s claim that such spending is akin to “borrowing” from future generations, are misguided.
“Rules that apply to households about debt don’t apply to the U.S. government. People often claim that because households reduce spending during tough times as a precautionary measure, the federal government should too. But this is a terrible analogy,” he wrote in In These Times in April 2020, as the economic impacts of the pandemic were becoming apparent. “In fact, the federal government should take on more debt exactly when households are trying to take on less.”