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Achieving Prosperity
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20005 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
5,439 Words |
| Author
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Norman B. Ture
Norman B. Ture is president of the Institute for Research on
the Economics of Taxation. |
The long 1990-91 recession and the seemingly slow and uncertain recovery have renewed widespread concern about the adequacy of the federal government's economic policies in achieving and sustaining prosperity. The presidential campaign has sharpened the focus on this question and has produced a resurgence of proposals for changes in government policies to accelerate and strengthen recovery and to get the economy moving on a higher and steeper growth path.
Indeed, these concerns are far more substantial than they have been in years. With the economy strongly recovering in 1984 and expanding at a satisfactory rate in 1988, macroeconomic policies received little attention in the political races in those years. Not since 1980 has so much emphasis been placed on devising new policies to energize the economy.
This emphasis itself reflects a very widely held view that the federal government bears responsibility for the condition of the economy. Makers of public policy almost universally assume that government, with the timely use of appropriate policies, can keep the economy on a steady course of expanding prosperity. In this Big Daddy view, prosperity and growth, on the one hand, or recession and economic distress, on the other, reflect the soundness or the ineptness of the current administration's economic policies. So when economic conditions are good, the administration in office happily takes credit for them, while the opposition party looks for downsides. Bad economic conditions are always the other fellow's fault; the administration asserts that they are the results of the bad policies of its predecessor or blames the opposition party in the sitting Congress, which in turn lays the onus on the White House.
Policymakers assure the public that the policies they advocate are needed to promote full employment, rapid growth, stable prices, low interest rates, competitiveness, and glowing success for whatever line of work or industry the audience comprises. Candidates for high office continually seek the policy silver bullet that will cure all our economic ills, as for example, Jerry Brown's promotion of a flat-tax proposal in this year's presidential campaign.
The media, too, promote the view that economic conditions and prospects are dictated by public economic policies and by the skill with which government officials touch various policy buttons. Economists of highly diverse analytical and ideological mind-sets, although differing about matters of how and why, share the conviction that government policies determine the
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