4.8 Policy Conclusions
An important lesson one can draw from the results is that while a deficit-financed expenditure
stimulus is possible, the eventual costs are likely to be much higher than the
immediate benefits. For suppose that government spending is increased by two percent,
financed by increasing the deficit: this results, using the median values from Table 5, at
maximum, in less than a two percent increase in GDP. But the increased deficit needs
to be repaid eventually with a hike in taxes. Even ignoring compounded interest rates,
this would require a tax hike of over two percent.8 This tax hike results in a greater than
seven percent drop in GDP. Thus unless the policy maker’s discount rate is very high
the costs of the expansion will be much higher than the initial benefit.
This general line of reasoning is consistent with the balanced budget spending
scenario whose impulses are shown in Figure 12. This shows that when government
spending is financed contemporaneously that the contractionary effects of the tax increases
outweigh the expansionary effects of the increased expenditure after a very short
time.