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shiranaihito  ·  3453 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: IMF warns US Fed should delay rate hike until 2016

There's a lot to unpack in the sentence you quoted.

For starters, what does "growth" mean? I think we intuitively interpret that to mean an increase in overall prosperity, but it could also refer to GDP growth and that's separate thing.

If the government pays 1000 people to dig ditches and fill them back in, that would count as an increase in GDP, but would be downright counterproductive to the generation of actual wealth (that would contribute to overall prosperity).

But that's not all! Any policy represents some sort of intervention in an economy, and any intervention in an economy is actually detrimental to wealth generation, because it affects what people are able or motivated to do.

Maybe you'd like to transport people to places for a fee, but then it turns out you'd need a $500k license to be allowed to do that, so you get discouraged and just collect welfare instead!

Can you see how interventions make it more difficult for people to engage in productive activities? This means that there is no such thing as "policies to address growth deficiencies", at least not if the policies are meant to generate an increase in overall prosperity.