Tag Archives: Bruce Bartlett

The “Debt Crisis” According to Bruce Bartlett: Generational Accounting

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Joe Firestone | 1 comment

This is the last post in my analysis and commentary on Bruce Bartlett’s testimony to the Senate Budget Committee. There’s one very significant issue left to discuss, and that is the issue of fiscal gap and generational accounting and whether it should be institutionalized in legislation. I’ll begin this post with that discussion and then end the series with my overall evaluation of his effort.

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Tagged Bruce Bartlett, Fiscal Gap, full employment, generational accounting, Inter-temporal Government Budget Constraints. fiscal policy, MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, neo-Keynesianism, paul krugman, Peter G. Peterson Foudation, platinum coin seigniorage, Senate Budget Committee

The “Debt Crisis” According to Bruce Bartlett: Debt Thresholds, and Wars

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Joe Firestone | 2 comments

This is the fourth in a series of commentaries on Bruce Bartlett’s recent testimony to the Senate Budget Committee. I appreciated his testimony and his critical evaluation of the idea that there is a public “debt crisis” in the United States. I also agree that there is no debt crisis. However, I was disappointed that his views, for the most part, did not show the across the board relevance to most aspects of the “debt crisis” of the fact that the United States is a fiat currency sovereign.

In the previous three posts, I’ve outlined the many contexts in which the fiat currency sovereignty of the United States is relevant to showing that the idea that the United States has or can have a debt crisis is just bunk. In this post, I’ll continue my discussion of Bruce Bartlett’s testimony in the same way.

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Tagged austerity, Bruce Bartlett, debt crisis, debt to GDP 90% threshold hypothesis, MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, Reinhart and Rogoff, sectoral financial balances, Thomas Herndon

The “Debt Crisis” According to Bruce Bartlett: Household Analogy, Inflation, Savings, and Taxes

Posted on March 9, 2015 by Joe Firestone | 4 comments

In the first two parts of this series of commentaries on Bruce Bartlett’s testimony to the Senate Budget Committee, I’ve reviewed the first 8 paragraphs in his statement. These points debunked various concerns of those who think the United States has a serious “debt crisis” it must handle before it takes on trivial problems such as its unprecedentedly high level of wealth inequality, lack of true full employment at a living wage, roughly 30 million people still lacking health insurance, one of the worst infrastructure systems in the developed world, transitioning from fossil fuels and ending climate change, creating a first class public educational system from pre-K through graduate school, ending the student loan crisis, creating a single standard of law for all, including the various categories of violators categorized as too big to prosecute by recent Administrations, and ending the student loan debt crisis, just to name a few.

However, what was noticeably missing from the variety of arguments given in his eight paragraphs was a recognition that the United States is a fiat sovereign nation and that this fact has serious implications for most of the subject matter Bruce Bartlett covers in his statement. In this post I’ll continue my analysis of his statement to explore the extent to which his views correspond to Modern Money Theory (MMT).

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Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged Bruce Bartlett, crowding out, debt crisis, Household analogy, inflation, loanable funds market, MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, savings, Senate Budget Committee, Taxes

The “Debt Crisis” According to Bruce Bartlett: Capital Investment, the “Debt Burden,” Fiat Currency, and the Debt Limit

Posted on March 7, 2015 by Joe Firestone | 8 comments

This is the second in a blog series of commentaries on Bruce Bartlett’s recent statement to the Senate Budget Committee. The first post in the series discussed a number of his comments on aspects of the “debt crisis,” a crisis he and I both believe doesn’t exist. I discussed a number of his reasons for doubting the severity of any debt problem and related each of them to the capabilities of the United States as a fiat sovereign.

In this post, I’ll cover the issues related to capital investment, the debt burden, fiat currency, and the debt limit. I’ll begin with Bruce Bartlett’s statement on how capital investments ought to be treated in the budget.

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Posted in Joe Firestone

Tagged Bruce Bartlett, capital investment, debt burden, debt crisis, debt limit, Fiat Sovereignty, seigniorage, Senate Budget Committee

The “Debt Crisis” According to Bruce Bartlett: Fiat Sovereignty

Posted on March 6, 2015 by Joe Firestone | 16 comments

Today, I’d like to offer the first of three commentary posts on Bruce Bartlett’s recent testimony before the Senate Budget Committee. Bruce Bartlett is a long-time veteran of the fiscal policy wars. He initially became known as a supply-side free market economist working for Ron Paul and then Jack Kemp in the 1970s. Later, he served as a senior policy analyst in the Reagan Administration, and then in the Bush 41 Administration as the deputy assistant secretary for economic policy at the Treasury Department. Since then he’s worked at conservative think tanks and as a well-known writer on economic policy and politics, becoming increasingly critical, first of the Bush 43 Administration and then of the increasingly rightward trend of the Republican Party. Today I think Bruce Bartlett is best characterized as a fiercely independent voice still respected in conservative circles, and also, among progressives such as Jamie Galbraith and Stephanie Kelton, but never afraid to call balls and strikes on any Administration or Congress as he sees them.

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