Ok we had a huge number of responses. I can see we will need a Blog 49 on this topic and that there are way too many comments for me to deal with tonight. I will just hit seven themes—commentators should be able to see which of these themes their comments fall under. And I will be brief. I will deal in more detail next week with a few of these.
1. Attention Deficit Disorder: A couple of comments here, and from what I can tell a huge number of comments on other “Modern Money” blogs that are not called MMT, suffer from ADD. Some people cannot read past a single sentence. I think there are now drugs that help. Try them.
So apparently a lot of bloggers (especially those who accept MMT, but without the taxes or the JG—go figure!) latched onto a sentence, plus one word. I said: “So, can we have MMT without a JG? Certainly!” Now that followed a long discussion, including an analogy to a theory of disease and a policy to fight the disease (more in a minute), and followed by the statement by me: “I believe it is a policy mistake to operate a modern money system without a JG—but that is what almost all countries do. MMT allows us to analyze them, and to offer policy recommendations. But if we leave out the JG in our recommendations, we are seriously remiss in our advice.”
