A Beginner’s Guide to MMT

The real issues are that:

* Inflation is treated as a bogeyman in the investor managed media rather than an integral and necessary part of a monetary system (you want real pain? try DEflation).

* Complete misrepresentation of the risks of hyper inflation and a total misrepresentation of why it happens (e.g. idiotically pretending that all zimbabwe/weimar/venezuela did was spend just a little bit too much on social programs).

I kind of wish inflation were kept in band between 7 and 12% via fiscal spending and taxation (as MMT says is possible). That would keep it below the level at which it would impact growth and above the level where wealth slowly gets hoarded by the 1%.

Really? How?

> If you printed your way out of debt that would be a default in all but name.

Oh, right, actually they don't. So in fact it is actually impossible to default on debt in your own currency and you're admitting as much.

> You would cause a collapse of credit and a collapse in confidence in the currency itself.

Right. And a reduction of value of a currency is also called inflation. Which is pretty well accounted for within the discussion.

This isn't true, or at least there isn't consensus around that idea all of the time

> doom is always around the corner

That's just the boom and bust nature of the economic cycles. It's true of any other natural cycle, from the fall from paradise to the fall of Rome. I recommend Georges Canguilhem "The Normal and the Pathological", though I must admit I didn't even fully understood that book when I read it as a teenager.

This is exactly what happens when new money in injected at exclusive points. The upper class accumulates ever more financial power, while the lower class is kept fighting over the scraps. An amount that could be a major life changing expense for most of the country is presently a throwaway gadget purchase for someone working for the banksters in NYC or the surveillance industry in SF.

Financially, MMT is analogous to a kid not being stopped for taking money from their parents' wallets to buy candy, so they move on to taking larger sums - whether this is actually a problem entirely depends on how much their parents make. Financial deficits only work as long as they do not undermine faith in the issuer. For the US, this effectively based on energy (historically including Saudi Arabia) and military might. "Withdraw" at a rate faster than "depositors" will tolerate, and faith in greenbacks will collapse.

MMT is especially ironic because it's gaining political support in the name of "going green". But it's actually the same vein of consumerist greenwashing as that "third R" - recycling. Heating up the economy fundamentally causes more crap to be produced ("full employment" !). If you want to conserve earth's natural resources and leave that carbon in the ground, support simply letting natural deflation actually occur.

I will say however, that if MMT can end up justifying an alternative to just dumping most of the consumer-bound printed money into the housing sector, that alone could be a great thing.