Kick the can of the sequester down the road. Short-term austerity needs to wait until after economic recovery. Short-term recovery requires pulling spending forward into the present and pushing taxes back into the future.
Menzie Chinn:
Econbrowser: Macroeconomic Advisers on the Sequester's Impact: Estimated self-inflicted macro harm, from Macroeconomic Advisers today:
...we now put the odds of a sequestration at close to 50%, and rising.
Our baseline forecast, which shows GDP growth of 2.6% in 2013 and 3.3% in 2014, does not include the sequestration.
The sequestration would reduce our forecast of growth during 2013 by 0.6 percentage point (to 2.0%) but then, assuming investors expect the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to delay raising the federal funds rate, boost growth by 0.1 percentage point (to 3.4%) in 2014.
By the end of 2014, the sequestration would cost roughly 700,000 jobs (including reductions in armed forces), pushing the civilian unemployment rate up ¼ percentage point, to 7.4%. The higher unemployment would linger for several years.
The macroeconomic impact of the sequestration is not catastrophic. Nevertheless, the indiscriminate fiscal restraint would come on the heels of tax increases in the first quarter that total nearly $200 billion, with the economy still struggling to overcome the legacy of the Great Recession, and when the FOMC is constrained in its ability to offset the additional fiscal drag with a more accommodative monetary policy…
