President-elect Trump stated in his victory speech that he intends to make America great again by infrastructure spending.
Unfortunately, he is unlikely to have the room for manoeuvre to achieve this ambition as well as his intended tax cuts, because the Government’s finances are already in a perilous state.
It is also becoming increasingly likely that the next fiscal year will be characterised by growing price inflation and belated increases in interest rates, against a background of rising raw material prices. That being the case, public finances are not only already fragile, but they are likely to become more so from now on, without any extra spending on infrastructure or fiscal stimulus. So far, most informed commentaries on the prospects for inflation have concentrated on the negative effects of an expansionary monetary policy on the private sector. With the pending appointment of a new President with ideas of his own, this article turns our attention to the effects on government finances.
Government outlays are already set to increase, due to price inflation, more than the GDP deflator would suggest. The deflator is always a dumbed-down estimate of price inflation. At the same time, tax receipts will tend to lag behind any uplift from price inflation. Furthermore, the wealth-transfer effect of monetary inflation over a prolonged period reduces the ability of the non-financial private sector to pay the taxes necessary to compensate for the lower purchasing power of an inflating currency.
Trump is a businessman. Such people often think that running a country’s economy is merely a scaled-up business project. Not so. Countries can be regarded as not-for-profit organisations, and democratic ones are driven by the consensus of diverse vested interests. The only sustainable approach is to stand back and give individuals the freedom to run their own affairs, and to discretely discourage the business of lobbying.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
