I agree with Jeffrey Sachs

Greg Mankiw points us to this article by Sachs, excerpt:

President
Barack Obama’s economic team is now calling for an unprecedented
stimulus of large budget deficits and zero interest rates to counteract
the recession. These policies may work in the short term but they
threaten to produce still greater crises within a few years. Our
recovery will be faster if short-term policies are put within a
medium-term framework in which the budget credibly comes back to
balance and interest rates come back to moderate sustainable levels….

We need to avoid
reckless short-term swings in policy. Massive deficits and zero
interest rates might temporarily perk up spending but at the risk of a
collapsing currency, loss of confidence in the government and growing
anxieties about the government’s ability to pay its debts. That outcome
could frustrate rather than speed the recovery of private consumption
and investment. Deficit spending in a recession makes sense, but the
deficits should remain limited (less than 5 percent of GNP) and our
interest rates should be kept far enough above zero to avoid wild
future swings.

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