Tag Archives: MMT

What I want to highlight here is this: the private sector needs government deficit spending if it is going to recover properly from both the heart attack of the Financial Crisis and the decades of disease brought on by income redistribution and rising debt levels. This is so because government deficits are private-sector surpluses. The logic is really very simple. What number do you get when you add up every trade surplus and trade deficit on the planet? Zero, of course, because one...

Maybe the British Labour Party could get Nancy Pelosi to do some stupid tweets for them as well. She is an expert at it – see my blog – When neoliberals masquerade as progressives. She thinks it is smart progressive politics to post tweets criticising her political opponents for a policy that “explodes the deficit … dumping … debt on every man, woman & child in America”. A fallacious argument. But moreover, a very stupid strategic argument because it fails to educate the public on what...

MMT in the Guardian!The Guardian A budget to increase national debt? That would be a pay rise for Britain Phil McDuff

A response to the Nov 17 thoughts of Simon Wren-Lewis Simon Wren-Lewis has put up a very considered post on the Job Guarantee which deserves an appropriate response. I have been calling for Simon to write about the Job Guarantee for a very long time, and I’m grateful he has done so. It is a very good piece from an alternative point of view and I hope I can do it justice in this reply. Modern Money MattersThoughts about the Job Guarantee: A Reply Neil Wilson

Jan Kregel presented a great dinner speech at the recent Modern Monetary Theory Conference, touching on some of the fundamental ways we think about money and economics. (Sorry, no recording or transcript available.) I had a brief conversation with him afterwards, and we followed up with a few emails. The quotation in the title of this post is condensed from the final line of one of his emails — a line that made me laugh out loud: “So I guess we start from that — in the beginning was the...

Professor Simon Wren-Lewis wrote "Some thoughts about the Job Guarantee," in which he makes an attempt to analyse a Job Guarantee using the NAIRU concept. The analysis suffers from the well-known defects of NAIRU. In the article, he argues that a Job Guarantee implementation would cause a one-time upward shock to wages. He argues that this is not "acknowledged" by MMT authors, even though it appears this effect is common knowledge to anyone who has read the MMT literature. As a result,...

On August 19, 1964, the then US President Lyndon B. Johnson established the – National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress. He established the Commission in response to growing concern during the deep 1960-61 recession that the unemployment had been created by the pace of technological change. Ring a bell! He wanted to an inquiry to explore this issue and come up with recommendations on how to deal with the possibility that automation was wiping out jobs and the...

A cursory glance at the World’s leading tax havens illustrates the hypocrisy of politicians getting wound up about the revelations in the recently released Paradise Papers and the Panama Papers before them. Many of the havens are within the direct legislative jurisdiction of nations such as the US (which is itself a tax haven) and the UK, for example. And we should not forget that Luxembourg, Switzerland are key European homes of tax avoidance. Remember that the current President of the...

One wonders what goes on in the heads of politicians sometimes. Perhaps not much other than a warped sense of their purpose in life – which for some seems to be to advance themselves rather than advance societal well-being. In recent days, fiscal debates have raged on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, there is the Trump tax cut debate. The correct progressive response would be to focus on why these cuts will not advance anybody but the rich and will do very little if anything to create...

The British newspaper, The Independent seems to be getting in beds with Commies lately. The evidence I elicit is the recent article (November 4, 2017) – Actually the magic money tree does exist, according to modern monetary theory – by a journalist Youssef El-Gingihy. It gives oxygen to the views of an Australian economist, one William Mitchell who espouses what is known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) – yes, you got it in one – another crackpot economic approach that fails to recognise...