[eru]

You can easily reverse monetary stimulus: just sell those assets that the central bank bought.

You can't really reverse fiscal stimulus. Once you paid people to dig holes and cover them again, you can't really get that money back.

Yes, public solvency is not an issue for governments that borrow in their own currency. But that's a separate concern.

[pjc50]

> Once you paid people to dig holes and cover them again, you can't really get that money back.

That doesn't matter though? If someone's unemployed, their labor is wasted, and you can't get it back. The money spent is not destroyed, it re-enters the economy when the workers you gave it to immediately spend it, and comes back to the government when they pay income or sales tax.

You can reverse fiscal stimulus by putting up taxes.

[eru]

> The money spent is not destroyed, it re-enters the economy when the workers you gave it to immediately spend it, and comes back to the government when they pay income or sales tax.

Be careful to keep the nominal and the real separate.

Destroying money is great! The Fed can just print more to make up the difference.

Equivalently buying stuff from China, and China hoarding the money they got forever is great, too. You got stuff, and the Chinese only got some database entries.

> If someone's unemployed, their labor is wasted, and you can't get it back.

Yes. (Though the leisure they enjoy isn't necessarily completely worthless. But let's ignore that for now.)

And we find that in general the private sector makes more productive use of people's labour (in real terms). Especially when compared not to the day-to-day running of existing civil servants, but to make-work schemes.

The Fed 'printing' money increases private sector spending and private sector employment.

> You can reverse fiscal stimulus by putting up taxes.

Taxes don't remove the money from the hands of the people you paid to dig the holes and cover them up again.

More importantly: taxes have substantial deadweight losses. Taxes cause real productivity losses.

(Just to be clear: I'm all in favour of financing the government from taxes that have low or zero deadweight losses, like property taxes or land value taxes.)

Selling assets from the central bank balance sheet on the open market has no deadweight losses.

[gg82]

> You can easily reverse monetary stimulus: just sell those assets that the central bank bought.

You can do that.... but watch the markets tumble and the interest rates skyrocket... and the politicians and bankers panic!

[eru]

Maybe, but that's a different issue.