So we’ve just refuted the claim that the required size of the budget deficit can be determined by the need to achieve full employment; as long as monetary policy is available, there is a range of possible deficits consistent with that goal. The question then becomes one of tradeoffs: would the things the government could buy with a higher deficit be worth the lost private investment due to a higher interest rate? Often the answer will be yes. But there is a tradeoff.

Now, this breaks down when the interest rate required to achieve full employment goes negative. If fiscal policy is contractionary enough that it pushes the aggregate demand schedule down to IS1, we end up at point A, well short of full employment. And this case has been all too relevant over the past decade! But it’s not always the way things work.

OK, so this seems clear to me, and hard to argue with. But Kelton does argue with it, or at least I think she does.

First, she suggests that the neutral or natural interest rate – which is defined as the interest rate consistent with full employment given everything else – does not exist. What does she mean by that? I think she means that it’s hard to determine, or maybe that it’s unstable, which are defensible claims. But the analysis I’ve just given doesn’t depend on the natural rate being either easily estimated or stable over time. In fact, I never mentioned the natural rate in the previous post. All we need is that the central bank be able to move rates, and that these rates affect overall spending.

So what purpose does claiming that the natural rate is a meaningless concept serve? It looks to me like sophistry – word games intended to confuse what should be a simple issue. Maybe that’s uncharitable, but I truly don’t see the point otherwise.

Second, and more important, Kelton seems to claim that expansionary fiscal policy – in Figure 1, policy that pushes the IS curve out from IS2 to IS3 – will lead to lower, not higher interest rates. Why?

It seems as if she’s saying that deficits necessarily lead to an increase in the monetary base, that expansionary fiscal policy is automatically expansionary monetary policy. But that is so obviously untrue – think of the loose fiscal/tight money combination in the 1980s – that I hope she means something different. Yet I can’t figure out what that different thing might be.