By J. D. Alt
*A work of fiction
The President appeared surprisingly upbeat and confident: He grasped the sides of the lectern—not as he often had in the recent past, as if to support and steady himself in moments of national turmoil—but rather as if he were about to lift it up and toss it aside. Adjusting his papers, he quickly made eye-contact with each reporter in the front rows, usually with a quick nod of greeting, but sometimes with a stern hesitation. Continue reading
Posted in J. D. Alt
Tagged fiat currency, MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, sovereign currency
By J. D. Alt
It is time to come to terms with the fact that U.S. dollars are what economists call “fiat money”. Having acknowledged this—and it’s difficult not to accept it as true since the U.S. abandoned the gold-standard over forty years ago—it might be worthwhile to give some consideration to what “fiat money” actually is and the peculiarities of how it works. Continue reading
By J. D. Alt
In his 12/8 Washington Post column, Ezra Klein says, “Projected deficits are driven by two factors: health-care-costs and old people.” He goes on to suggest, quite logically it seems, that in order to pay for all the health-care services elderly American’s are going to require, tax rates will to have to be raised so high they’ll begin “doing real damage to the economy”, or deficits will “grow to the point that they cause a fiscal crisis.” Continue reading
By J. D. Alt
It was in the year 2020 that a majority of people first began to “see” what money is. For a few months—after the “realization” started hitting the pages, airwaves, blogs, tweets and twits of mainstream media—it became a silly joke: “2020 perfect vision, at last! How could things have been so blurry for so long?” For thousands of years, in fact. Continue reading
By J. D. Alt
You know those radio collars they put on grizzly bears, so they can track where they go through the bushes and forests? Well, I’m pleased to announce they’ve developed a radio collar that fits on a U.S. Dollar. (This was a particular accomplishment since most U.S. Dollars now are electronic, the essence of their existence coded on magnetic discs, the embodied code appearing and disappearing, disc to disc, not unlike the quarks and neutrinos of quantum mechanics.) Without going into how they did it, then, we can simply announce that now we can track a U.S. Dollar through the bushes and forests of our economy and, hopefully, on this episode of NATURE, discover the roots and results of wasteful government spending. Continue reading
By J. D. Alt
In Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal (Capital Journal, Looking Past Fiscal Cliff to a Genuine Tax Overhaul) Gerald Seib lays out a very sensible argument about why the U.S. tax code needs to be rewritten “for the 21st century.” He points out that the tax code we are using was created in 1913 (before the Great Depression and the New Deal, I might add) and was last revised in any meaningful way in 1986—“before the Internet had any commercial use, before most of us had cellphones, before the U.S. began running $1 trillion annual deficits, before the oldest baby boomers retired, before income inequality had become a global phenomenon, before the advent of the euro, and before China, rather than Japan, became America’s main economic competitor.” Continue reading
By J. D. Alt
In his recent book The Social Conquest of Earth, Edward O. Wilson lifts a corner of human history and reveals what appears to be a hidden mechanism of its intricately complex guidance system. It shouldn’t be a surprise this inner clock-work is genetics. What is surprising is to see the relationship between this genetic mechanism and the monetary debate that is unfolding as we speak. Continue reading
By J.D. Alt
Since there seems to be general agreement that our current economic system is fatally bankrupt, it might be interesting to try a simple thought experiment to see if we can forge a more perfect union. Let’s quickly visualize a new nation from scratch—and set it up properly, so we don’t find ourselves, ever again, facing a “fiscal cliff.”
By J. D. Alt
My brother, Jeff, is a very smart guy who went to West Point, got a masters degree at Purdue, had a successful career as a business man and now, in his retirement, can sometimes beat his wife at golf. I sent him the NEP link to Playing Monopolis Monopoly and the other two essays I wrote as well, Men on a Wall and New Sense Common Sense. Since then we’ve been corresponding about MMT—with me trying to get him to “see” it, and he, to his credit, actually doing his best to “see” it while also collecting a lot of other opinions on the topic. Recently he sent me one of these other opinions, which included a textbook circular flow diagram that seemed to prove that MMT was impossible. Continue reading
By J.D. ALT
The principal dilemma of the progressive cause is that it has allowed a bedrock conservative premise to go so long unchallenged; indeed the progressives themselves have either overtly or implicitly agreed with the premise, making it virtually impossible for them to effectively advocate their goals:
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