Congress passed a big relief bill in the spring and financed the spending by borrowing trillions.Congress is considering further economic stimulus now, which raises the prospect of another increase in US government borrowing. In April alone, the United States recorded a larger budget deficit in a single month than it did for all of the 2017 fiscal year, a total of $738 billion. Running such a large deficit would have been politically untenable just a year ago; since the end of World War II, economists have often warned that doing so would risk runaway inflation and possibly unsustainable tax hikes on future generations. But now, even some of the country's most ardent deficit hawks have watched the debt pile up and said: More, please. The coronavirus pandemic has brought a new sort of deficit scolding to Capitol Hill, with economists and lawmakers warning the United States is not borrowing enough to carry the nation through a debilitating recession that could turn into a second Great Depression. A legion of economists, Federal Reserve officials and even some of the most outspoken proponents of deficit reduction in recent years are now urging Congress and President Trump to continue spending trillions of dollars to prevent a long-term collapse in business activity and prolonged joblessness. Behind those calls is a confluence of events that have enhanced the economic case for rising deficits a combination of rockbottom interest rates, falling consumer prices and a deep plunge in consumer and business activity. Many economists said in the past that large public deficits and debt would bog down the economy, by pushing up borrowing costs for businesses and sending consumer prices soaring. Now, the Federal Reserve has made clear that low interest rates, which have been slashed to near zero, are here to stay, making it cheaper for the United States to borrow money. Inflation, which struggled to get out of the gate during an 11-year expansion, seems confined to the woodshed. In order for America to survive the recession and minimize the damage, many economists are now urging lawmakers to spend more. They want additional aid to small businesses, continued enhanced unemployment benefits for workers and more assistance for state and local governments that have seen a steep falloff in tax revenue and have already laid off 1 million workers. Such spending, economists argue, would hasten a rebound in economic growth and help save businesses that might otherwise fail, generating a return to the economy that exceeds the relatively low future interest costs incurred by prolific borrowing. The Fed have lent considerable support to that effort, by promising to keep interest rates near zero for as long as the economy remains in crisis and buying vast sums of the Treasury bonds that support government borrowing. Polls show Americans worry about the nation's deficit and debt, but that those worries have declined in recent years. Many economists' worries have declined, too, in an era of persistently low interest rates and inflation that has remained lower than the Fed's target rate of 2 percent, and receding fears of the government "crowding out" private borrowers which is to say, government borrowing pushing up interest rates to such a degree that private companies find it harder to get access to capital. In his presidential address to the American Economic Association in 2019, the economist Olivier Blanchard made the case that policymakers in such an environment should be much more willing to take on additional debt. Many other leading economists agree.

Republicans have grown more tolerant of deficits under Mr. Trump, who famously said as a presidential candidate that he would eliminate the national debt within eight years, but has instead swelled borrowing. Mr. Trump's sweeping package of tax cuts in 2017 did not pay for itself as promised, and he has signed bipartisan agreements to boost federal spending. That helped to push the deficit above $1 trillion in 2019, well before the current health emergency. The crisis sharply accelerated the deficit. It will hit $3.7 trillion for the fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office projects and, by the end of September, the budget office says, the amount of debt held by the public will be larger than a full year of economic output in the United States. Fiscal hawks had warned that growing deficits under Mr. Trump, which came despite an unemployment rate that fell to 50- year lows, could hamstring the federal response to an economic crisis. Now that such a crisis has arrived, and deficit fears have begun to surface in Congress, many of those hawks say they feel vindicated.

Identify at least two arguments for and two arguments against a further increase in government debt in the text above. Explain each of the arguments in terms of Macroeconomics concepts.