Like Punxsutawney Phil, I’ve started to come out of my hole after last week’s trauma. I was angry at Everybody, including myself.[embedded content]Party politics of any sort will be a distant concern for a while. What is not is the burgeoning war in the ME. We should lean hard into support for an aid cut-off to Israel. Everything. Note that what’s in question here is not the material effect of the aid, but the political one inside Israel. We need to recognize the distinction between Judaism and Zionism, between Jews and Zionists, and seek Jewish allies rather than pre-judge or stereotype them.Sure, other things are important too, and the incoming Administration will be setting all sorts of fires that will beg to be put out. In politics, focus and repetition count for the most. It will

By Max B. SawickyHere is a sample from my Substack.The key antagonists on Trump and fascism, the ones I have noticed, include Corey Robin, John Ganz, Timothy Snyder, Samuel Moyn, and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins. Except for Ganz, they are all credentialed professors at well-regarded universities. No disrespect for Ganz; I tend to agree with him the most. I have high regard for all of them.In another sense, however, the entire debate seems off. It is focused on relating, or distinguishing, Trump and the MAGA movement to or from historical analogs in Germany and Italy. To me it reads like a pissing contest for academics. I respect the scholarly activity, but the implied politics leaves me cold.There is no lack of fascism-mongering among some Democratic Party voices, not to mention MSNBC, but

By Max B. SawickyHi EconoPeeps. I launched this cockamamie blog for my pals when I had to abandon my own and work for the Federal government (Government Accountability Office, not CIA). Then my webhost "1 and 1" (now Ionos) erased the entire blog, which I had been doing since about 2004. I was delinquent in a monthly payment and they failed to warn me.Now I’m retired but still writing. I have a substack to which I’ve been posting regularly. Subscriptions are free and there is no segregation of paid from free subscribers. I tell people I don’t need donations but they make me happy. I was dithering on how and when to restore my own website, but I’ve noticed this one seems to be going strong, one of the few genuine blogs still running. So I’m going to cross-post here for a while. It will be

Might not be MMT, but it isn’t Socialism

So there has been a lot written on Modern Money Theory lately. There is this piece by The Economist, Jerry Epstein’s paper, and Lance Taylor’s one, more on the Democratic Socialist ideas than MMT per se (here). There was also this op-ed by Robert Shiller in the NYTimes, and the two posts by Tom Palley, that I reposted here on the blog. Finally, Christine Lagarde also commented on MMT during the World Bank/IMF Spring Meetings.I can and I will not comment again on my views on this. As I said before, I’m a fellow traveller in the sense that I do agree with MMTeers on functional finance (even though Randy Wray, at the Easterns, presenting Stephany Kelton’s slides suggested that functional finance was a late addition to MMT,  coming from Matt