167 Automatic Stabilizers
What you’ll learn to do: explain fiscal policies, including automatic, expansionary, and contractionary fiscal policies
In this section, we will segue from discussing government budgets, per se, to discussing fiscal policy. Recall that fiscal policy is the use of changes in government spending and tax rates to influence the path of the macro economy. Every federal budget reflects some fiscal policy. Fiscal policy approaches range from passive to activist. In this section, you will use the AS-AD model to help you understand how governments use fiscal policies to fight against recession and inflation, and also to promote economic growth.
Learning Objectives
- Describe how fiscal policy can be designed to stabilize the economy using automatic stabilizers
Fiscal policies include discretionary fiscal policy and automatic stabilizers. Discretionary fiscal policy occurs when the Federal government passes a new law to explicitly change tax rates or spending levels. The stimulus package of 2009 is an example. Changes in tax and spending levels can also occur automatically through non-discretionary spending, due to automatic stabilizers, which are programs that are already in place, and thus do not require Congress to act. Instead, they prevent aggregate demand from falling as much as it otherwise would in recession, or they hold down aggregate demand in a potentially inflationary boom. Let’s see how this works.
Counterbalancing Recession and Boom
Automatic stabilizers include unemployment insurance, food stamps, and the personal and corporate income tax. Suppose aggregate demand were to fall sharply so that a recession occurred. The lower level of aggregate demand and higher unemployment will tend to pull down personal incomes and corporate profits, which would tend to reduce consumer and investment spending, further cutting aggregate demand and GDP. Consider, though, the effects of automatic stabilizers. As individuals are laid-off, they qualify for unemployment compensation, food stamps and other welfare programs. Additionally, since their income has fallen, so have their tax liabilities. All of these things serve to buoy aggregate demand and prevent it from falling as far as it otherwise would. Thus, recessions are somewhat milder.
The process works in reverse, too. Consider the situation where aggregate demand has risen sharply, causing the macro equilibrium to occur at a level of output above potential GDP. Because taxes are based on personal income and corporate profits, a rise in aggregate demand automatically increases tax payments, reducing disposable income and thus spending. On the spending side, stronger aggregate demand typically means lower unemployment, so there is less need for government spending on unemployment benefits, welfare, Medicaid, and other programs in the social safety net. The combination of these automatic stabilizing effects is to prevent aggregate demand from rising as high as it otherwise would, s