I've already said twice that there is wide spread agreement about the basics but not specific policy.
I'm not sure that your posts amounts to anything more than a more complex way to say the same thing.
Is debt good or bad?
Is saving good or bad?
Depends on the circumstances. There could never be a simple agreement even if economics was as hard of science as say chemistry, because debt and savings are done in different amounts, but different people, in different circumstances, for different reasons.
What should the target inflation rate even be?
You don't have specific agreement, but almost everyone looks for something like 1 or 2%. Maybe the gold bugs look for 0%. No one is looking for a negative rate or for a high rate of inflation. You used to have the belief that there was a long run, or at least a medium run trade off between inflation and unemployment, but Milton Friedman and others (and the practical experience of the 70s) showed how this isn't really the case. In the short run very easy money can decrease unemployment while increasing inflation, but in the long or even the medium run you can get stagflation from trying that method. So now there is a wide spread agreement that inflation should be kept fairly mild. They might target zero, but they don't because 1 - You can't control things very tightly with confidence, if you aim for a particular point you are unlikely to precisely hit it, and 2 - There is a wide spread agreement (again not universal, but a strong majority, probably a "consensus") that deflation is bad. |
