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MMT for Toddlers
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Very funny, gets the message so accurate and easy to understand. Perfect gift for Xmas stockings.
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Nice.
But, I’m always reminded of “the five whys?” of process improvement. Will you issue an equally straightforward and accessible coloring book answering the “five whys?” each of these assertions poses?
Nice book. But there’s a need for a simplified version so that Kenneth Rogoff and others at the Harvard department of economics can understand it all.
Great primer, Professor K.
Only issue is that the embedded document on this site gets scrambled into gibberish. (It may be just a Firefox browser issue.) Had to download a copy to my PC via Adobe Reader to get the proper and correct format.
Same problem here, solved by letting the page choose its own fonts instead of forcing the use of selected fonts in Preferences.
WOW..just noticed that. Thanks.
I love it, and I envy Stephanie for being an academician, since her students are obliged to listen to her.
No one listens to me if I speak to them in person about MMT. 20% of people are hostile, and the other 80% simply don’t care. And I never make an MMT-relevant comment on any web site, since I will get flamed.
A couple of other propositions come to mind. Actuaslly these are corollaries to Stephanie’s ten propositions…
Proposition #11: For the purpose of spending, the US government does not borrow money from China, from bankers, from investors, or from anyone else. The US government creates its money out of thin air. It can no more “run out of money” than a sports scoreboard can run out of points.
Proposition #12: Since the federal government has infinite money, no federal program can ever become financially unsustainable.
Proposition #13: For monetarily sovereign governments like the USA’s, the “national debt” is trivial, the “debt-to-GDP ratio” is meaningless, and federal taxes do not pay for any federal program, project, or operation. Indeed, federal tax revenue is destroyed upon receipt (i.e. totally removed from the money supply).
Proposition #14: The purpose of austerity is to increase the supremacy of the rich, and the supremacy of the financial economy over the real economy. (The former is a crippling parasite on the latter.)
Proposition #15: The lies (which support the rich) continue because everyone (rich and poor, liberal or conservative) uses the lies for his own ends. Example: Right-wingers falsely claim that there is no money for social programs. Left-wingers falsely claim that federal taxes support corporations, or war, or Wall Street, or Israel, or whatever.
Ha! Great, though clearly some MMT opponents have intelligence below that of a toddler?
This is brilliant, Stephanie! Although I do plan to print it up and put it in my teenage son’s stocking (and maybe my spouse’s as well), I think the ideal “toddler” audience is our politicians…
I’ve seen enough threads online from NK and NK-ish economists to know that MMT is simultaneously something very strange and crazy and not worth considering, and, even worse, it says all the same stuff as textbook NK economics so it adds nothing to the discussion.
Most people who actually think about these issues would agree with most of these propositions even without subscribing to a specific monetary policy framework, but I do love that MMT folks that I find online will just say them, plainly, without preceding them with a 400-word disclaimer about how deficits definitely the worst problem ever under certain conditions.
It’s a power thing. When you start an argument by obsequiously begging others to think that you agree with them and do that by showing your ability to repeat their cant, you’ve pretty much given them the high ground and they have no reason to consider anything else you have to say.