Conservative economists try to argue against Keynesian policies by resorting to several strategies. The most common is to feign ignorance: "There's no such thing as a liquidity trap and even if there were, we're not in one now." They tend to invent all sorts of strange definitions for what a liquidity trap must be. In fact it's quite simple. Normally the Fed manipulates the economy by manipulating the money supply through interest rates: if inflation is high or they think there's a bubble forming in some sector, they raise interest rates, reducing the money supply. If the economy is struggling, they lower interest rates, increasing the money supply, called "adding liquidity". But when rates become zero, these lose effectiveness: if there's no profit in it, folks would rather keep it in a shoebox than lend it to the Fed. Or pay to lend it, which is what a negative rate would be. Zero lower bound. Keynes argued that when this happened, the government should take advantage of the low rates and borrow money to spend on infrastructure. This will put people to work, and they'll buy groceries and cars and pay rent, which will put other people back to work, which will expedite the economy getting back onto its feet. During the liquidity trap, there's necessarily very low or even sometimes negative inflation, but once it has ended, inflation will quickly pop up. At that point, the Fed can raise rates and slow inflation down. But it has a strong incentive not to: The new debt gets smaller if there's inflation. So the Fed must play a balancing act.
Conservatives argue that recessions and depressions are just the result of business cycles and these can no more be manipulated than the weather. Well, no. Paul Volcker saw the stagflation of the late 70s and early 80s and discovered that half-measures weren't stopping it. So he raised interest rates very high and intentionally threw the economy into recession. This brought inflation down but it killed a lot of jobs. Despite the conservatives constant harping about business cycles, most of the theory behind the deregulation that took place in the late 90s was based on the Fed's proven historical ability to keep the swings within bound. But deregulation created banking that was outside of the Fed (or any regulator's) purview and no amount of raising of interest rates could have stopped the bubble. If there's shadow banking that will lend for less than the Fed and borrow for more, the Fed no longer can control the money supply through rates. Shadow banking nearly always leads to bubbles and collapses, and in most cases liquidity traps. Nobody can really make money by undercutting the Fed this way, but in nearly all cases where there is shadow banking, there is also fraud.
The next false meme from the conservatives is that much of the current unemployment is "structural". By this they mean there is a mismatch between the skills of workers and available jobs. There clearly is some structural unemployment going on, but the data makes it clear this is a minority. First of all if there's demand for a product, but not enough supply, this will drive the price up until the employer can afford to do whatever it takes to get the product made: retrain workers, lure the skilled workers they need from other employers with higher wages, buy new machinery, etc. This clearly isn't happening. There are certainly a lot of cases where an employer would happily pay skilled workers at less than market rates so they can sell their product for a lower price, but that's not the same thing as "demand". Structural unemployment is necessarily "sticky": it takes a while to retrain workers when requirements change. As the slow recovery progresses, some workers do get retrained, some old workers retire, and some new workers enter the market with new skills.
There are lots of roads needing to be repaired, kids to be educated, fires to be put out, etc., and there's plenty of money in the economy to do it.
"I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization" -Oliver Wendell Holmes
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