The lousy job picture continues to inspire debate over the need for further government stimulus, though I have to say that much of the debate is less than inspiring.

Take Ben Bernanke's comments to Barney Frank yesterday. As fund manager Marshall Auerbach notes today, the Fed chairman admits that the U.S. cannot default on its debt so long as Congresss lets the Treasury borrow by boosting the debt ceiling.

So why does the Fed worry about the sustainability of the deficit, and thus effectively lobby against more fiscal stimulus? One reason is that it's protecting its turf. By fretting over the deficit despite the improbability of default, the bank is suggesting that monetary policy be given primacy over fiscal policy in regards to managing the economy, even though it may be less effective at getting the economy out of the hole it currently is.

Another reason, of course, is that Fed economists tend to be neo-classicists who really believe, mistakenly or not, that fiscal policy is ineffective at managing the economy.

That leads straight to another part of the debate, which Berkeley economist Brad DeLong furthers along in a column published today by Project Syndicate. There in DeLong points out that critics of government spending are engaged in some specious reasoning regarding the so-called multipliers that economists assign to various types of expenditure.

The bottom line here, as DeLong says, is that critic Robert Barro ultimately relies on the old theoretical argument that taxes will have to be boosted later to make up for the lost revenue, and that the timing of future taxes doesn't matter.

Not true, says DeLong. At that point, after the Fed is likely to have raised interest rates because the economy has recovered, it could lower rates again to offset impact of the taxes on the economy.

Concludes DeLong: "Barro is simply wrong when he claims that although the stimulus boosts employment now, amortizing the stimulus must inevitably reduce employment at some point in the future."

Now if only more economists, including those at the Fed, fell out of thrall of the kind of thinking that has paralyzed the government since the early 1980s, and not coincidentally helped fuel the financial crisis, we might actually develop a consensus for action instead of wasting time in fruitless and disingenous arguments.