by Summary:
Let's hope Jeremy Corbyn and his team cotton on to MMT soon. This will leave the Tories as the high taxation, austerity party with diminished public services. Pay more, get less.Bryan Gocke says that MMT would be difficult to implement as the elite have so much power and run the financial system and corporations and would stymie a Labour party which tried to implement it, but he thinks there's a chance it could win through. I might add, after all, who would have thought the NHS could have come about with so many vested interests against it.Bryan Gocke says the corporate media won't be much good at spreading the idea of MMT, but the it can be spread through the social media and the internet as the young and many people now mostly use that now for their news. KV In Britain, if it wasn’t for
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Let's hope Jeremy Corbyn and his team cotton on to MMT soon. This will leave the Tories as the high taxation, austerity party with diminished public services. Pay more, get less.Let's hope Jeremy Corbyn and his team cotton on to MMT soon. This will leave the Tories as the high taxation, austerity party with diminished public services. Pay more, get less.Bryan Gocke says that MMT would be difficult to implement as the elite have so much power and run the financial system and corporations and would stymie a Labour party which tried to implement it, but he thinks there's a chance it could win through. I might add, after all, who would have thought the NHS could have come about with so many vested interests against it.Bryan Gocke says the corporate media won't be much good at spreading the idea of MMT, but the it can be spread through the social media and the internet as the young and many people now mostly use that now for their news. KV In Britain, if it wasn’t for
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Mike Norman considers the following as important:
This could be interesting, too:
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Bryan Gocke says that MMT would be difficult to implement as the elite have so much power and run the financial system and corporations and would stymie a Labour party which tried to implement it, but he thinks there's a chance it could win through. I might add, after all, who would have thought the NHS could have come about with so many vested interests against it.
Bryan Gocke says the corporate media won't be much good at spreading the idea of MMT, but the it can be spread through the social media and the internet as the young and many people now mostly use that now for their news. KV
In Britain, if it wasn’t for BREXIT we would be discussing (among other things) Labour’s proposed economic policies, including an expansion of public sector spending. There would be a storm of media led disparagement about plans to stimulate the economy through borrowing and increased taxation and concerns raised about not paying down the national debt. As Theresa May said whilst campaigning for the last general election “There is no magic money tree.”
I find it particularly disheartening that many well informed, left leaning people buy this criticism, worrying whether the country can afford improved public services and whether this will make Labour unelectable. The stock response of the Left to this would normally go along the lines of:
- The Tories are in disarray and deeply split over BREXIT and thus just might be even more unelectable than a slightly radical Labour Party.
- Britain is a rich country; surely it can afford better public services than it currently has?
- Labour’s proposals are, in truth, underwhelming! They represent such a modest step in a process required to reverse a decade of austerity and cuts.
- Revenue from taxation in Britain has become wholly inadequate to the task of ensuring a fair, equitable society. Increased progressive taxation would begin to re-establish a common, shared responsibility for all citizens and fund the necessary increase in public spending.
- The current focus on ensuring a balanced national budget and paying down the National Debt is misplaced and thwarts economic regeneration and development. Britain, with its well established capital markets, has had no trouble borrowing funds to finance the public sector deficit since the financial crisis of 2008 [1] and thus could fund public sector programmes in this way in the future. At current, low, levels of interest, it would be foolish not to do so! Moreover, provided that interest and repayments are in Sterling (hence avoiding the risk of exchange rate fluctuations), borrowing essentially represents a transfer of funds from savers to the Government – the country as a whole is neither richer nor poorer. A large proportion of the national debt is money that we owe to ourselves. However, the payment of interest does represent a transfer of funds from taxpayers to savers; individuals and commercial organisations profit from the need for the Government to borrow.
- An economic stimulus focussed on improving public services could be used to re-establish secure, full time jobs and help to reverse the current trend towards precarious short term zero hours contracts[2]. The wages would almost entirely be spent by the workers (as opposed to being hoarded / used for speculation by richer people) and thus would serve to stimulate the economy further through the multiplier effect. Spending wages will stimulate other parts of the economy; you get a bigger bang for your buck as well as progress towards a better society!
It was with considerable interest therefore that I read a recent article by Jim Kavanagh on Modern Monetary Theory [3], which suggested that the Left needs to update and refine the way it promotes the credibility of a an economic stimulus approach that focusses on investing in public services.
Jim provides an excellent summary of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and I will attempt a rather briefer one here in order to provide the context for a discussion about the chances for implementation in Britain and its possible consequences.
The Off-Guardian