Mark Sadowski May Be a Great Wonk But He Doesn't Know What 'Personal' Means

     I don't know how to tell Tom Brown but it seems that me and the great Sadowski have apparently fallen out. I don't get it, but he's declared that I don't talk about anything substantive and have been unfairly personal:

     "This is pure BS. When was the last time you said anything substantive or asked a question about something substantive?”

    I pointed out that he and I had a perfectly substantive discussion in the past-I said Monetary Realism but he corrected me that it was at Interfluidity. 

   "That was at Interfluidity, and it was over a month ago. Since then your comments have been completely devoid of substance and they have become increasingly personal over time. At this point I find your behavior more disturbing than any other single commenter I interact with.”

    Well, ok then, I guess there's no love connection. He seems to think that it was at Interfluidity rather than MR is an important point in his favor against mine and evidently he has agreed that I have asked substantive questions in the past just not for the last month.

   Still I think he ought to get a primer on what personal means. I mean what lead to the recent tiff between us is ask about the monetary offset that Sumner spends so much time on. Sadowski responded by claiming that I'm 'unhinged' and 'histrionic'-I have no idea what he thinks that means either. However, as far as personal goes, well, judge for yourself. 

    Sumner wrote a piece called 'Mark Sadowski Drives Another Stake Through Keynes So I left a comment directed to Mark."

    "So Mark what is the bottom line you’re suggesting: as long was we have monetary offset then the more austerity the better? After all, the more austerity the GOP imposes on us the more monetary offset we’ll get?"

    "For me I see this as just a clever, backdoor argument for austerity-which would never make it through the front door, which is where the Republicans keep trying to enter."

    "I would never deny that I’m cynical-if the world were different so would I be-but this seems to me to always have been the political trick of Monetarism."

     "For me better than having monetary offset is a CB that would support expansionary fiscal policy during a bad recession like the one we’ve had."

     http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=24180

      As you can see it was a substantive question about the implications of monetary offset. There was nothing remotely personal here. Was my question pointed? Perhaps he took it this way but Sumner's post starring him was pretty pointed-about how he has 'driven another stake through Keyneianism.' He shot me back a long answer but I felt this was unnecessary and crossed the line:

      “I would never deny that I’m cynical-if the world were different so would I be-but this seems to me to always have been the political trick of Monetarism.”

    "There’ a fine line between cynicism and paranoia. Often I think you’ve gone off the deep end, because many of the things that you say, such as this, are histrionic and completely irrational."

      So as you can see he's the one who made it personal. There was nothing in my question that was in anyway personal. What I guess is closer to the truth is that at this point MM is becoming such a close tent that anything but belief is taken seriously. 

     I still don't get why Sumner keeps pushing that the fiscal multiplier is zero other than he hopes to somehow convince policymakers to never do fiscal policy no matter how deep a recession. Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks that the MMers even the wonkish one himself, seem to have gone off the deep end.

    "The previous post in which Scott lifted a comment in which I criticized Paul Krugman elicited the following comment by Cullen Roche with a link to that post:

      http://pragcap.com/budget-deficits-contribute-to-corporate-profits-but-dont-matter-right

     “…This is the second time in the last few weeks I’ve emphasized this point. The reason why is because I see some economists rampaging against the impact of fiscal policy trying to claim that it has no positive impact on the economy…”

    "Personally I don’t think my comments last time were violent, uncontrolled, reckless, or destructive. All I did was point out that in Krugman’s previous post, where he presented evidence for the existence of the liquidity trap, he totally ignored how monetary and fiscal policy interact, and that it is crucial to consider such interactions."

     http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=24180

      Here is his definition of Keynesianism:

     "The genuine Keynesian position is that monetary policy is ineffective in a liquidity trap, and thus fiscal policy becomes both effective and necessary. But if you don’t believe in the liquidity trap, and I don’t, then the only way to fix an aggregate demand shortfall is through better monetary policy."

    Again, he says that my question to him was personal because I asked about monetary offset as an argument of never doing fiscal stimulus, yet here he says this:

     "One of the points of Monetarism is that fiscal stimulus is never effective. But even Keynesians agree with this away from the zero lower bound."

     Now, actually not all Keynesians believe this-the post Keynesians who believe themselves more true to Keynes don't. In any case this was my point-this is what monetarism is about. So when I made this argument I'm somehow being personal or not being 'serious' and yet he defines monetarism the same way I did. Where exactly is the disagreement then? Monetarism's claim that fiscal stimulus is never effective is something that must be fought back at. At the end of the day, what is the case against fiscal policy according to the Monetarists?

      1. That we can allegedly get the same bang for the buck with monetary policy without a rise in public debt. 

      2. The CB will offset it. 

      First of all, number two is not a law of physics but is simply an assumption about the politics of the current CB's makeup. Sumner argues that the Fed will offset any FS-he seems to think that simply ending the sequester would count as FS. I'm not sure this is true-after all, Bernanke has himself requested fiscal stimulus repeatedly. 

      http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/05/sumner-and-fed-also-disagree-on-ui.html

     http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-fiscal-multiplier-sumner-vs-bernanke.html

     Even if he's right-after all the Fed currently is not loosening money any further with an inflation rate of only 1.1%-it still doesn't mean we shouldn't do fiscal stimulus but rather that we should get new people at the Fed. The Fed would be a much better institution if it were less 'independent." 

    As to public debt I don't get why this is a worry during the middle of a recession as interest rates continued to drop as public debt rose-the first few years of the downturn. Sumner never can explain why we should worry about public debt during a downturn with record low interest rates. He can also never explain-nor can austerians in general of which he is one-why we need do cuts to get rid of the deficit rather than what we did after WWII-we simply grew ourselves out of our huge debt level. 

  So I don't know what to tell you Tom Brown-me and your idol seem to have irreconcilable differences. On his end. I'm not angry as he seems to be with me-I'm must puzzled why he's gotten so cagey. 

  As to his claim that I've either gotten personal or distorted his positron I think it's clear that this is not the case. I asked a perfectly reasonable question as to the relationship between MM and fiscal austerity. It seems like the non-answer of even the most wonkish and seemingly reasonable MMer-Mark Sadowski-says a lot in itself. 

      

   It's interesting that I somehow drove the seemingly unflinchingly wonkish Sadowski to get snarky. I guess that's an accomplishment of a sort!