Tag Archives: MMT

By Thornton (Tip) Parker Most MMT advocates probably took months to get comfortable with it.  But like a personal computer, one need not understand its innards to use its power.  The great power of MMT is its lesson that the federal government can create new dollars by running deficits to do things that should be done.  But the lesson is counterintuitive and will be rejected by voters unless it can be explained convincingly in a few minutes.  This paper offers five nuggets for explaining it...

This is how the mission of the President’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform was defined by the White House on February 18, 2010: The Commission is charged with identifying policies to improve the fiscal situation in the medium term and to achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run. Specifically, the Commission shall propose recommendations designed to balance the budget, excluding interest payments on the debt, by 2015. This result is projected to stabilize the...

By J.D. Alt Here is what the HUD.GOV website says about the status of low-income housing in America: “Families who pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing are considered cost burdened and may have difficulty affording necessities such as food, clothing, transportation and medical care. An estimated 12 million renter and homeowner households now pay more than 50 percent of their annual incomes for housing. A family with one full-time worker earning the minimum wage cannot afford...

By J.D. ALT Even if we assume the principles of modern fiat money will be generally accepted at some point in the future, we must yet confront the problem that sovereign spending is a difficult issue for market economies. It could easily unfold that even with the new “modern” money perspective in place, a serious recession could still find federal stimulus spending unnecessarily constrained. This difficulty was on full display in the last recession when Obama’s stimulus package was finally...

Bill Mitchell has written a great post here about the Eurozone’s threat to democracy: Bill Mitchell, “Democracy in Europe requires Eurozone Breakup” Billy Blog, January 6, 2016. It is a pity that more professional Post Keynesian economists do not take this view, for it is so obviously true.

By L. Randall Wray My previous blog sparked a lot of discussion, especially over at Naked Capitalism. I do pity Yves Smith! There’s enough nonsense in the commentary to populate a large nation. As I have argued, it is very hard to figure out what the debt-free money folks want as they are confused on the accounting, vague on the terminology, and rarely provide details on their proposal. However, a reader has directed me to a fine published article that has mostly got the accounting right,...

By L. Randall Wray Some time ago, I labeled the “debt-free money” campaign a non sequitur in search of a policy. (See here.) However, this non sequitur refuses to die. I went on to joke that if they want a debt-free money, they ought to propose that government issue bananas as currency. I frequently am asked to do interviews and I almost always accept them. However, when I was asked last week to participate in a radio show devoted to debt-free money, I struggled mightily to get out of it....

Below is an excerpt from my most recent e-book: Real Fiscal Responsibility, Vol. I: The Progressive Give-up Formula. The book is volume I of II critiquing austerity politics at the Federal level in the United States. It exposes its fallacies, its closed-mindedness and futility, and especially its reliance on wrong-headed conceptions of fiscal sustainability and fiscal responsibility. In this volume, I relate neoliberalism, the Washington Consensus, and austerity politics pushed by the...

L. Randall Wray Yesterday Senator Bernie Sanders gave an important speech in which he invoked President Roosevelt’s “second bill of rights” in defense of his platform. As Bernie rightly pointed out, all of Roosevelt’s New Deal social programs to which we have become accustomed, were tagged as “socialism”—just as pundits are branding Bernie’s proposals as dangerous socialist ideas. You can see Bernie’s prepared remarks here. Just before Bernie’s speech, I was asked to do an interview with...

The intensity of the conflict over the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has died down since last June, after the Administration won its victory in getting Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) through Congress. During the Intervening months, the efforts of the Special Trade Representative (STR) to complete TPP negotiations have continued. At the end of June, the goal was to complete negotiations by August so that the Administration could send the Agreement to Congress in enough time to start the...