On the other hand NGDP is totally transparent. It’s easy to understand if Bernanake says he’s printing money so that American incomes can grow at a steady rate of roughly 4% per capita. If growth in average incomes has slowed due to recession, then it’s easy to understand why the Fed would think higher income growth would help the average American.This is supposed to an alternative to the Fed targeting inflation. The idea is that when nominal incomes fail to grow steadily--and they either stagnate, fall, or accelerate rapidly--this has a tendency to gum up the works of the capitalist economy. The intuitive sense of these comes from the old problem that capitalism depends on the self-interested independent action of a large number of consumers and, especially, asset-holders, which can result in all kinds of social "irrationality" from individually rational activity. But how much of that irrationality can really be mitigated just by ensuring a steady and predictable nominal growth rate?
(There is also, I should note, a problem of mean vs. median: given the political economy of the past few decades, a 4% increase in per capita income entails much less than that for ~90% of the population and much more for 1%.)
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