If the Fed had not raised interest rates

Today, economists often moan that we are cursed with sluggish recoveries from recessions because of the zero bound problem with interest rates. If you point out that the zero bound problem could be easily eliminated merely by raising the trend rate of inflation enough to keep nominal interest rates positive, they moan that they’d rather keep the inflation target at 2%.
Revealed preference suggests that if they aren’t even willing to take a trivial and almost costless change in the inflation target to fix this supposedly really serious problem, then obviously the problem can’t be all that bad. I conclude that the economics establishment is not sincere; they must have a hidden agenda somewhere.

PS. And please don’t say, “But they struggled to raise inflation to 2% during 2015-18, so what makes you think they could target 4%?” Yes, it’s tough to raise inflation during a period of time where the Fed raises its target interest rate nine times. LOL.

If the IOER was  left in place then the relevant parameter would be seigniorage taxes.   At the time the ten year rater was close to 3% in Q3 of  2018.  That would mean nearly a 3% Fed tax on banks. That is absolutely high.

What Scott wants is what Beckworth wants, 'whatever it takes' and it takes a partial defualt and that means a new Fed contract. Scott and Beckworth and most economists have an Overton window, some things they are not allowed to say.  Whatever it takes is code.  So is general price rise. So is expectations.  These are fake connectors to put into the model something outside the Overton window.

I have no Overton Window. I can tell you that a 2% default rate on debt eliminates about 1/3 of the burden in 15 years, and reach Scott's target of 2% growth in NGDP via 2% growth in direct losses by the Fed.  Economists suffer from fear of another Nixon shock.