January 2014 Was Scott Sumner Month

      In my discussion with Tom Brown on Sumner and whether or not Tom's claim is true that Sumner's primary concern really is monetary policy-with fiscal policy and politics being very secondary-my answer is : then why does he spend so much time denigrating fiscal policy? We've really had very little fiscal stimulus. Yes we had some in 2009-though not enough-but since then we've had sharply contractionary policy.

     As Sumner wants to see the size of govt shrink he must have loved January.

     "January was a tough month for the public sector, with job losses across the board and especially in education:

      "Your mileage may vary on the merits of this, but in general the balance of private-to-public employment has swung pretty heavily in the direction of the private sector over the past six years. It's an underrated trend."

      http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/02/07/january_public_sector_job_losses.html

      No doubt Sumner thinks it's a very good thing. Romney had run on cutting education too. So January was a good month for him as well.  This is why I aruge we've had Market Monetarism for 4 years-fiscal austerity plus QE. 

      Has it worked? To hear Sumner tell it, it's worked swimmingly-MM has 'driven a stake through the heart of Keynesianism.'

      I never get how he gets here. I mean is the fact that we're still having a hard time of it over 6 years after the recession begun-4 years after it's official end-something to brag about? If so, then indeed MM 'won.' 

     "Today is jobs day! The good news is that the unemployment rate fell to 6.6 percent—the lowest it's been since October of 2008. But the news is basically bad."

     "The economy added 113,000 jobs in January, which isn't horrible, but it's not very good either. And December's very weak 74,000 jobs was revised upwards but only very slightly to 75,000. Now November went up from a strong 241,000 to an even stronger 274,000. Taken as a whole that three-month span isn't awful. But it's not remotely the pace of job growth that you would normally associate with a rapid decline in the unemployment rate."

      http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2014/02/07/january_jobs_report_bad_news.html

      Yet Sumner claims it's Keynesians who suffer form confirmation bias. 

      http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/01/keynesian_confi.html