On the Limitations of Fiscal Policy: a Radical Kalechian View.

Kalecki was one of the co-developers of the principle of effective demand. This was used by many economists, in the post war period, to argue that government fiscal policy could be used to stimulate effective demand and fine tune the economy to reduce cyclical unemployment. Kalecki, however, was always dubioud of this proposition. Initially, he argued that expansionary fiscal policy, in the form of budget deficits, could reduced unemployment, but that to sustain this lower level of unemployment would require ever increasing deficits. Later, in his famous "Political aspects of full employment" Kalecki was much more skeptical of even this positions.