Monthly Archives: October 2013

MMT and the Struggles of Political Democracy

By J.D. Alt

A principal dilemma of the theory of modern fiat currency (MMT) is the question of how the state spends the money it issues: who decides, and by what process? It may be frustrating to watch U.S. Congressmen and Senators bicker and behave as if their national government has run out of dollars, but it is sobering to consider what would happen should these legislative prodigies suddenly realize that, in fact, there are no currency constraints on their spending at all. It is hard to imagine who, or what, would step in to impose some kind of discipline and planning for the spending spree that would ensue. I suspect that many who actually understand fiat currency are hesitant to overtly embrace it for precisely this reason—because they are unsure what structure exists, or could be put in place, that would rationally manage the remarkable levels of sovereign spending MMT makes possible.

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Would Janet Yellen as Fed Chair Mark a Shift in Economic Policy?

The latest episode of the Black Finance and Fraud Report from The Real News Network. Bill is discussing whether Yellen’s confirmation marks a victory for progressive democrats?

Or you can visit the TRNN site that includes transcripts.

The Tea Party’s Tactical Brilliance and Strategic Incompetence

By William K. Black

The Tea Party and its (non) think tanks have proven that they are tactically brilliant in manipulating the Republican Party, but strategically incompetent.  Today’s Senate Bill, which will be forced down the House Tea Party members’ throats, is the result of that strategic incompetence.  The Tea Party has learned that there are a few things many GOP elected officials are still unwilling to do.  Specifically, once the admittedly slow-witted House GOP leadership realized that the Tea Party had marched it to the far edge of a bridge to nowhere and the choices were (Option One: suicide) to keep marching off the bridge into the river (doing grave harm to the Nation and the world, ruining the GOP “brand,” returning the House to control by the Democratic Party, and threatening their own seats or (Option Two: truce) to stop and beg the Democrats for a truce – the GOP leadership would abandon the Tea Party and blame it for the humiliating rout.

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Off the Debt Limit Hook for at Least the Next Four Months

By Joe Firestone

Provided that the Senate and House follow through on the scenario now on the table, it looks like the game of chicken worked for the Democrats this time. We’re off the hook on default and Government shutdown for now, and Washington village pundits are in full-throated cries of celebration.

Congress is off the hook too. They don’t have to offer any solutions to real, rather than manufactured, problems.

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Should We Mind the Gap?

By*:  Dylan Steelman, Samuel Ellenbogen, Scott Frank and Steve Bodenheimer

Introduction

In his May 2011 column, “Is There Really an Output Gap,” CNBC financial blogger John Carney argues that the output gap—the difference between the economy’s potential performance and its actual performance—is a flawed theoretical construct that policymakers should avoid using as a basis for economic policy.  Carney presents most of this through a “thought experiment” involving a hypothetical tobacco-based U.S. economy called Tobacco America.  In the thought experiment, demand for tobacco explodes driving up prices for various tobacco inputs and taking the economy to new heights.  Eventually the dangerous health aspects of tobacco become widely known and the demand for tobacco plummets, taking the economy down with it.  Carney uses the Tobacco America thought experiment to make two arguments against the concept of an output gap—one is stated directly and the other is strongly implied.

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Boehner’s Trophy

By William K. Black

This article is inspired by David Firestone’s article in the New York Times entitled “Boehner’s Last Stand.”  Firestone’s lead is the key:

“The nature of Speaker John Boehner’s final battle with the White House on the budget crisis is now clear: It doesn’t matter what House Republicans win in exchange for raising the debt ceiling and re-opening government, as long as they win something.”

I write to propose an award a grateful nation should immediately bestow on Boehner in a national ceremony broadcast live on every media outlet from the White House’s Rose Garden – The Winner’s Trophy.  It should be in the form of a Boehner-sized weeping angel bearing the following inscription:

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Rugged Egalitarianism – Hope in the Ruins

By Dan Kervick

As I write, American conservatism has gone mad: openly, disturbingly and resoundingly bats. There is no mistaking it. But the furious imprecations and cracked laughter of the lunatic conservatives echoing loudly down the halls of our sad American bedlam have helped obscure the fact that liberalism in the United States is moribund.  While conservatives strive to tear down our rotten and unjust system and replace it with something even more terrifying, liberals offer nothing but a determination to patch up some of the superficial rot while approving the general injustice.

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Rationalization and Obligation, Part VI: What He Ought to Do, What He Probably Will Do

By Joe Firestone

This is Part VI of a six part series replying to a claim by the President at his recent White House News Conference. Part I covered the News Conference and the first two (the selective default, and the exploding option) of seven options the President might use to try save the US from defaulting in the face of continued deadlock in the Congress on raising the debt limit or repealing the law enabling it in its entirety. Part II discussed Platinum Coin Seigniorage, invoking the 14th amendment to justify continuing to issue conventional Treasury debt instruments, and consols. Part III discussed premium bonds, and Treasury sales of the Government’s material and cultural assets to the Federal Reserve. Part IV, then evaluated all seven options in light of variations among them in likely degree of legal difficulties they might face, and also the likely impact of each on confidence in the bond markets, if used. Part V then summarized my evaluation of the seven options. This part will end the series by saying first, what the President ought to do, and then by saying what I think he is most likely to do.

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Are the elites turning on each other?

By Glenn Stehle

[T]he Revolution offered the opportunity of tearing the mask of hypocrisy off the face of French society, of exposing its rottenness, and, finally, of tearing the façade of corruption down.

-HANNAH ARENDT, On Revolution

Once in a blue moon events conspire to “tear the mask of hypocrisy” off the face of what John Gray has called “the ruling mythology.”   Could we be living through such a moment?

Probably no greater evidence of this is to be found than in a recent speech Ross Gittins, economics editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, gave before the Australian National Conference on Resources and Energy.   This is what Gittins — clearly no friend to the working person — had to say:

We all pursue our self-interest, but we all cloak our self-interest in arguments about how this would be in the best interest of the economy. All I’m doing is stripping away the bulldust.

[….]

What hasn’t yet occurred to many business people – but you can be sure is well understood by the politicians and their advisers – is that when industries lobby governments for favours or in opposition to new imposts, the various industries are in competition. It’s easy to imagine the government’s coffers are a bottomless pit but, in fact, there’s only so much rent to go around….  The truth is, when one industry gets in for a big cut, there’s less left in the pot for the others.

–ROSS GITTINS, “The Political Economy Outlook for Reform,”

Stunning is the only word to describe the three admissions Gittins makes, not just in the fact he made them, but also in the matter-of-fact way he does it.  Let’s summarize:

1 )   Businessmen “cloak” their “self-interest in arguments about how this would be in the best interest of the economy,”

2)  The profits and well-being of various industries are very much dependent on what government does, as opposed to what Mr. Market does, and

3)  Businessmen are bellied up to the government trough, but there’s not unlimited largess to go around, so the various industries are in competition with each other.

All I can say is:  WOW!  Talk about tearing the mask off the myth of market fundamentalism!  Amitai Etzioni points out in The Moral Dimension that neoclassical economists have struggled long and hard to “leave out half of the story:  The use of political means for monopolistic goals.”   Now Gittins, all of a sudden, is fessing up, and in no uncertain terms, to the other half of the story.   The subterfuges of neoclassical economics are thrust out into the open.  Not only is the importance of government to corporations’ bottom line admitted to, but also the great lengths they will go to in order to manipulate government policy.

One can’t help but be reminded of when the mask got ripped off of French high society, when Louis XVI’s “ill-fated cabals and intrigues” and the “willfully corrupted manners” of “Court society” came to light.  Louis XVI’s predecessor, Louis XIV, had been able to keep these regal practices “apart from the style in which he conducted affairs of state.”  Louis XVI, on the other hand, was not so fortunate.  And when the mask got torn off, the “lower strata responded by violence and brutality” to the “mores and ‘moral’ standards, the intrigues and perfidies of high society,” which were “nothing but a rather awkwardly construed frontage with which to cover up, and win time for, an even more inept intrigue” (Hannah Arendt).

How did things come to this?  The unmasking seems to have come about due to the spread of powerful new ideas in combination with shifts in the concrete conditions of life.  For any number of reasons a society can stop expanding.  The production and distribution of goods, eventually reflected in standards of living, stalls or declines.  This pits elite against elite, as well as the frustrated struggling majority against elites of any stripe.  This is what seems to have happened in France. 

As the economic condition of France deteriorated in the 1780s, competing factions of the elite vied to capitalize on the newfound ideas of liberty, equality and popular sovereignty in order to marshal popular support for their own particular causes.  First the monarchical government, invoking equality, tried to enlist the people in the struggle to do away with the privileges of the nobles and the clergy.  The nobility and clergy paid no taxes, plus were entitled to massive government pensions.  Just one noble family, for instance, received pensions of 1.5% of the total annual revenues of the crown for doing nothing    (Eugen Weber, The Western Tradition, “39.  The death of the old regime” ).   

The privileged groups – nobles, clergy, gentlemen, lawyers, and intellectuals – struck back against the royal government, “brandishing slogans like liberty, and natural law, and representation in order to defend their privileges.”  They argued they should be liberated from paying taxes, but of course not from their generous pensions and other perks.  Mme Roland, in her final moments as she was being led to the guillotine, poignantly captured the hypocrisy inherent in the clergy and nobility’s brand of libertarianism when she cried:  “Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!”

The revolutionary “fuses were lit,” therefore, not by the peasants and workers, but by the elites themselves.  However, it backfired on the elites.  When the Third Estate finally did come to power it proved quite capable of taking care of politics itself and all the economic privileges of the elite, whether of nobility, clergy, or officers of the crown, were abolished.

In Australia, as Gittins explains, we also see various privileged sectors currying popular support, trying to cast their special economic privileges as “a popular cause.”  Historically, however, this has not been an easy task.  As Weber goes on to explain in the next segment, “40.  The French Revolution” of the The Western Tradition, not even a highly talented politician and administrator like Napoleon was able to pull it off, and in the end popular sovereignty exerted itself and thwarted his efforts.

 

Inside Modern Money Theory: Our Route to Full Employment and No Debt

By Rollo Martins
Cross Posted from PolicyMic.com

America has a tool that millennials can — and should — use to trump all the negatives that are piling up at their doorsteps (the high unemployment, international competition, and all that college debt). This tool is called the U. S. dollar, which aligned with a fiscal policy designed for growth and prosperity, would eliminate their debt and give them full employment for the remainder of their lives.

A sea-change is occurring in economics and the University of Missouri-Kansas City is leading the way. Combining a fiscal policy geared toward prosperity and growth with a new understanding of what fiat currency means for the country, the economists there are touting what is being called Modern Money Theory. MMT turns traditional neoclassical economics on its head: Instead of tax then spend, it’s spend then tax. In other words, we can spend whatever we want. (But I oversimplify: There is still inflation to worry about.) This is all great news for the country, and for the millennial generation in particular.

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