Tag Archives: fiscal policy

“The Treasury must explain the reasons for any departure from the previous mandate and/or supplementary targets.“ From the current Charter for Budget Responsibility’s fiscal rules“The Treasury may from time to time modify the Charter… When the Charter is modified the Treasury must lay the modified Charter before Parliament.”From the 2011 Budget Responsibility and National Audit Act 2011—————-There’s no getting away from it – in the manner in which it has put forward today’s...

I’ve written a ‘top 10’ overview of the 2020-21 Alberta budget, tabled on February 27. The link to the overview is here. Nick Falvo is a Calgary-based research consultant with a PhD in Public Policy. He has academic affiliation at both Carleton University and Case Western Reserve University, and is Section Editor of the Canadian Review of Social Policy/Revue canadienne de politique sociale. You can check out his website here: https://nickfalvo.ca/....

Thank you, as always for your succinct and cogent analysis. Consider that increased taxation to support provincial government spending, while entirely justified, is essentially a shift in spending, not an increase, and its stimulative effect will be small. Particularly with the collapse of oil revenues, Alberta must receive substantial federal support. The federal gov’t which owns a central bank with sovereign currency has the fiscal capacity to fight long wars, bail out the whole...

Not specifically about MMT but this: Now, Covid-19 could be a great opportunity for the United States and, also, for the world economy. With interest rates nearing zero, this could be a good opportunity to use fiscal policy to revive the economy. This is something that the defenders of the so-called Modern Monetary Theory, such as the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, Olivier Blanchard, and also many banks, have been calling for for years, seeing how their margins...

Image: latest version of Charter including fiscal rules, put before Parliament January 2017 Dirty secrets? Yesterday (5 March) the Financial Times published an article by its economics editor Chris Giles, under the title “The Treasury has two dirty secrets on its fiscal rules”. Underneath that, the...

I’ve written a summary of a recent study I co-authored on savings to the health and justice sectors associated with Housing First (i.e., the immediate provision of subsidized housing, along with social work support, to persons experiencing long-term homelessness). The study, based on a large sample size from Calgary, finds that every $1 spent on Housing First is associated with more than $2 of savings to the public system (i.e., the health and justice sectors). The...

I’ve written a summary of a recent study I co-authored on savings to the health and justice sectors associated with Housing First (i.e., the immediate provision of subsidized housing, along with social work support, to persons experiencing long-term homelessness). The study, based on a large sample size from Calgary, finds that every $1 spent on Housing First is associated with more than $2 of savings to the public system (i.e., the health and justice sectors). The...

Abstract The power to coin money is a fundamental constitutional power and central element of fiscal policymaking, along with spending, taxing, and borrowing. However, it remains neglected in constitutional and administrative law, despite the fact that money creation has been central to the United States’ fiscal capacities and constraints since at least1973, when it abandoned convertibility of the dollar into gold. This neglect is particularly prevalent in the context of debt...

Stephanie Kelton, among others.Project SyndicateWho's Afraid of Fiscal Policy?

Stony Brook University economist Stephanie Kelton is a proponent of something called modern monetary theory (MMT), a new school of economics that argues that as long as a country is in charge of issuing its own sovereign currency, it can't "run out of money." According to MMT, if Greece were still using its own currency, the drachma, instead of the euro, then it could have printed more money to pay off its debts, especially if inflation was low to begin with. Instead, as part of the...