Tag Archives: economic policy

MMT. And he also talks about rent extraction! "So why are UK politicians obsessed with balancing the books rather than helping their citizens to lead healthier lives? The answer seems to be that the many UK politicians are strongly influenced by the desires of a powerful financial sector. While a finance sector is important, it is also predominantly a rent extraction industry. It mainly acquires wealth either on the backs of other people’s labour or their debts (interest). Progressive...

Amid the recent upsurge of leadership speculation, this time affecting the government, a crucial observation on the so-called National Energy Guarantee seems to have been missed. No one thinks the NEG is a good policy: its selling point is the claim that it could resolve, once and for all, the political fight over climate and energy policy.  After the last few days, that claim has fallen in a heap. A few days after claiming the endorsement of his party room for the previous version of...

One of the questions that often comes up in economic discussions is: why is a positive inflation rate seen as a good thing? There are a few angles to this question, which makes it somewhat more complex. I am somewhat ambivalent on the subject, but I believe the best answer lies in the area of political economy, not economic theory.… Bond EconomicsWhy Is A Positive Inflation Rate A Good Thing?Brian Romanchuk

It’s obvious enough by now that support for Trumpism in the US and elsewhere is motivated primarily by racial and cultural animus, and not (or at least not in any direct way) by economic concerns. Still, to the extent that Trumpism has any economic policy content it’s the idea that a package of immigration restrictions and corporate tax cuts[1] will make workers better off by reducing competition from migrants and increasing labor demand from corporations. The second part of this claim...

I’m going to be talking to Steve Austin on ABC 612 Brisbane today, hopefully about COAG’s rejection of the Turnbull government’s National Energy Guarantee. As I said when this policy was cooked up in a matter of a few weeks last year The most important thing to understand about the federal government’s new National Energy Guarantee is that it is designed not to produce a sustainable and reliable electricity supply system for the future, but to meet purely political objectives for the...

Stephanie Kelton and I have been trying hard to keep Democrats from, again, rushing into the trap of denouncing Republicans for running federal deficits. Yes, Republicans are hypocrites about debt and deficits. That does not mean that Democrats should repeat Clinton and Obama’s embrace of the Republican’s economically illiterate, harmful, and fake hysteria about debt and deficits.... In general, good government is good politics. The Democrats should focus on adopting and supporting...

Economics, like fashion, has its hot ideas. Among the hottest ideas of 1982 was the theory of contestable monopoly, described as an ‘uprising’ by its leading proponent William Baumol. To quote the summary in Wikipedia Its fundamental features are low barriers to entry and exit; in theory, a perfectly contestable market would have no barriers to entry or exit (“frictionless reversible entry” in economist William Brock’s terms).[1] Contestable markets are characterized by “hit and run”...

I’ve just joined 22 other Australian energy researchers in calling for the release of the modelling used to justify the Abbott-Turnbull government’s National Energy Guarantee. Until this is out in the open, state and federal Labor should have nothing to do with the NEG. I am confident that, once the modelling is released, it will quickly be shown to be so weak as to provide no support for this camel of a policy, designed to placate both the Abbott denialists and the business lobby who...

The latest ACCC report on the National Electricity Market is an incoherent mess, reflecting the breakdown of the neoliberal/market liberal assumptions on which both the ACCC and the NEM are founded. But I can at least endorse this statement There are many causes of the current problems in the electricity market. At all stages of the supplychain decisions have been made over many years by many governments that set the NEM on thewrong course. As I said in a report to the Electrical Trades...

That’s the title of my latest piece in the Guardian.Opening paras Privatisation has been the last fiscal resort of desperate governments for decades. By now, just about everyone in the community understands that the supposed windfall achieved by selling income generating assets is spurious. Voters have routinely tossed out governments that have advocated or implemented privatisation, sometimes by stunning margins. The only people who haven’t got the memo are the politicians who make...