The Finance 202: Democratic economists call for big spending, total rethink of deficits as GOP seeks austerity
The paper could be ammunition for how the incoming Biden administrations aims to counter new calls from congressional Republicans for a return to austerity, after the rising tide of debt they authorized under President Trump.
Biden won on a pledge to rebuild the economy with multitrillion-dollar proposals for infrastructure, clean energy projects, and social safety net expansions.
Centrist economists from Summers, a treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, to former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, who was appointed by President George W. Bush and kept on by President Obama, endorsed more spending during a virtual panel cohosted by the Brookings Institution and the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
“Nobody on the panel is going to say we should be balancing the budget any time soon,” Bernanke said, recommending instead that the U.S. plow money into addressing climate change, inequality, health care and infrastructure — investments he said would