William K. Black
September 26, 2017 Kansas City, MO
UMKC has just hosted a well-attended conference on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and job guarantee (JG) programs in which the federal government would provide the funds for employer of last resort programs. In conjunction, MMT and JG allow full employment to become the norm. MMT is based on reality, it explains how the monetary system in a nation with a sovereign currency actually functions. Most monetary theory taught in conventional economic classes is a fiction arising from carryovers from the era of the gold standard in which nations lacked a sovereign currency.
Jared Bernstein has just published an op ed in the New York Times entitled “Do Republicans Really Care About the Deficit.” Republican elites, of course, have not really cared about federal budget deficits for decades. That is a good thing that Democrats should embrace in a bipartisan spirit. Bernstein, of course, is correct that the Republicans are hypocrites about federal budget deficits, pretending to care about them when the Democrats hold power and displaying their lack of any real care when Republicans hold power and the context is tax cuts for the wealthy.
