:seinfeld:
Is it all lib hokum? I was in my local theory shop yesterday and was looking at The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton, something I put on my reading list a year and a half ago.
Since then I've listened to and read Matt Bruenig's criticisms of MMT and found them pretty convincing but I haven't really spent much time reading the anything on the "pro" side.
Is this worth my time to read a book on MMT or is it just a distraction? Thoughts?
MMT is bullshit until there's a way to quickly adjust some tax rate, primarily on the ultra wealthy and the corporations, to control inflation. As it currently stands, it takes months of political grandstanding to tweak taxes slightly and even then it's never on the wealthy, it's just months of bickering over which way to tax poor people more.
Until a proposal for that comes out, MMT is nonsense from a practical standpoint.
Isn’t that would the Federal Job Guarantee is supposed to do? I thought the idea was to somehow control inflation by expanding or contracting federal spending on the program as needed.
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Yep. Businesses do poorly when there is not enough slack in the labor market. They want a certain level of unemployment to keep the workers' condition precarious.
Not sure if neolibs call it this, but I've heard it referred to as "surplus labor". It's a combination of people looking for jobs, people who can't currently work, people doing unpaid labor (disproportionately women), retired people, etc.
They can be called in to work if needed and then dumped back into the labor pool. See: women during WW2
reserve army of labor?
I was specifically talking about more recent theory, specifically among the post-work or anti-work crowd. This book is fairly influential in that space and talks about this directly starting around page 92 of that pdf.
my bad, I didn't see that Eugene_V_Dabs had mentioned it
I agree and that's what I also see as the major flaw with MMT, though I think it could very well work if it ever were to be implemented correctly.
inflation is not a all the result of money creation at the moment so it could work
I don't know that there are sufficient control mechanisms in place if the inflation got out of hand though. It's a very drastic measure to adopt MMT, and I'd definitely want to make sure that we take inventory of the risks and prep for them before any attempt at it.
There's also the problem that it assumes the state is working in the interests of the people. With our government all I can imagine happening is an out of control party in which every politician sprays as much money as they can at every company who will smile at them and at their own personal business ventures. But then nothing for regular people because it's not like the political barriers to displeasing capitalists would dissolve. We'd have 100 the budget for the military and exactly the same budget for healthcare.
we were already doing mmt, though just for the rich as usual, not that i would implement mmt though, my preference would be a reversal of the money system where debt no longer exists. The government might not be working in our interests, but depoliticizing money AND pretending technocrats are neutral is worse, both for heightening contradiction purposes and if we manage to wrest the state power, plus it will make the shutdowns less likely, it is amazingly working in japan, against all economist predicitions (even mine lol), and they're not exactly staunch leftists. Don't underestimate the bipartisan consensus for borrowing to supply the MIC, printing more money is simply gonna lower a bit the interests the US pays, that's it, otherwise it is jst political power and potentialities