Tag Archives: MMT

Want Jobs? Forget the Fed!

By Dan Kervick

Matt Yglesias beats a dead monetarist horse – the same defunct nag whose flogged and forlorn carcass should have been cremated years ago – by again seeming to pin the chief responsibility for attacking unemployment on the Fed, and on its supposed control over inflation and inflation expectations.  And yet as is often the case with Yglesias, the elected political leaders of the most economically powerful nation in the world rate no mention in his post, despite their scandalous and incompetent failure to address a national employment debacle.

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What Do You Want For America

By Thornton Parker

People who understand how this country’s financial system works know the American dream doesn’t have to die.  They know why the federal budget is not like a family’s budget or the budgets of companies and states.  They know why the government can’t run out of money, default, or go bankrupt; and why Europe’s financial troubles won’t come here.  They know the government can afford to do more to help educate young people, improve everyone’s health, provide income assistance as people age, foster a sound economy with good jobs, modernize the infrastructure, and protect the environment.  And they also know that popular myths and deliberate misrepresentations of the system are hurting America.  Continue reading

A Guide to the Deficit Aviary

By Rose Cahalan
(Cross-posted from Alcalde)

UT professor James Galbraith is drawing attention for his unconventional position on the U.S. deficit. Galbraith and his fellow “deficit owls” stand apart from the better-known deficit hawks and deficit doves. Hawks think we should act now to reduce the deficit; doves think we should act later. Owls, by contrast, think the deficit isn’t a problem, now or later; it’s just a natural part of growth. Continue reading

Denison Volunteer Dollars: The Currency of Civic Engagement

The Mixed Economy Manifesto – Part 4

By Michael Hoexter, Ph.D. 

[Part 1 is posted here; Part 2 is posted here; Part 3 is posted here] 

The Anti-Keynes Revolt

Against the Keynesian consensus of the WWII era and afterwards, there remained marginalized economic schools that held to ideal notions about markets and remained convinced that a reliance on government was tantamount to a “Road to Serfdom” and ultimately led to Communism.  The core of the neoliberal campaign, gathered around the Mt. Pelerin Society founded by economist/social philosopher Friedrich von Hayek, denied that government management of capitalism’s excesses was needed and that the price system and the market were pure, self-regulating entities which bring maximum prosperity and liberate the individual.   Continue reading

MMP Blog 50: MMT Without the JG? Conclusion

By L. Randall Wray

Sorry for the interruption of the blog. Originally I had planned 52 blogs, one-year’s-worth, although along the way I added a few so that we would have run about 13 months. Here’s why: the blogs came from a book manuscript, the Modern Money Primer. The idea was that you would not only be a test audience, but that your questions and comments would allow me to revise the manuscript as we went along. And that worked. I think the manuscript was much improved because of this blog. You helped write the book.

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The Fiscal Summit Counter-Narrative: Part Three, Are There Spending Constraints On Governments Sovereign in Their Currencies?

By Joe Firestone

An issue at the core of all the fuss about fiscal sustainability is Government solvency. The deficit hawks and doves believe that Governments sovereign in their own currency can run out of money if they keep deficit spending, and keep borrowing to do it. They believe that if deficit/debt levels are high enough, then Government insolvency can occur, because eventually the burden of interest on the public debt will crowd out all other public spending and investments. So, they are for working towards debt/deficit reduction, “reforming” (i.e. cutting) entitlement spending, and raising taxes, though not necessarily on the rich.

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The Fiscal Summit Counter-Narrative: Part Two, Defining Fiscal Sustainability

By Joe Firestone

One of the most irritating things about the deficit hawk/austerity literature, is that it uses the ideas of “fiscal sustainability” and “fiscal responsibility” in an ideological way, without ever really analyzing or explaining these labels. It’s almost as if the austerians know that if they clearly and directly stated what they meant by these terms, and how their meanings were actually related to the ideas of “sustainability” and “responsibility”, then flaws in their whole ideological and policy framework would be very clear to everyone else.

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Fiscal Summit Counter-Narrative: Part One

By Joe Firestone

Well, it’s Springtime in DC. Time for the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s annual event. The Fiscal Summit, to be held on May 15, better named the Fiscal Cesspool of distortions, half-truths and lies, is a propaganda extravaganza designed to maintain and strengthen the Washington and national elite consensuses on the existence of a debt crisis, the long-term ravages of entitlement spending on America’s fiscal well-being, and the need for long-term deficit reductions plans to combat this truly phantom menace. The purpose of maintaining that consensus is to keep an impenetrable screen of fantasy intact in order to justify policies of economic austerity. that have been impoverishing people and transferring financial and real wealth to the globalizing elite comprised of the 1% or far less of the population, depending on which nation one is talking about.

The 2010 Fiscal Summit

The first “Fiscal Summit” was held in Washington, DC on April 28, 2010. It was lavishly funded by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and included many “big names” associated with “fiscal sustainability” and “fiscal responsibility,” including Bill Clinton, who appeared along with personalities from Peterson’s stable of deficit hawks such as David Walker, Alice Rivlin. Robert Rubin, Alan Simpson, Erskine Bowles, and Paul Ryan. Its purpose was to spread the deficit hawk message of Peter G. Peterson, including various myths of the world-wide austerity movement: Continue reading

The (Semantic) Problem with MMT: An Exercise in Framing

By J.D. ALT

My wife is no longer speaking to me. She got angry—hysterically angry—over MMT. This caught me off guard. I could not understand it. She was on the verge of throwing her wine glass across the patio. She banged the glass table where we sat with her fist, which alarmed me. This began as a quiet, after-dinner conversation pursuing her casual inquiry about how my Monopolis Monopoly Post had been received.

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