16 thoughts on “MMT”

  1. MMT, AKA the Economics of Wishful Thinking, deserves to die a painful death. It’s being sold by the same people pushing the Green Leap Forward. Walt Disney said that “Wishing will make it so.” That’s nice when you’re pushing a cartoon fantasy but not so good when pushing government policy.

  2. It doesn’t matter how people feel about MMT or the negative impacts it has on society and civilization. Feeling it is dead doesn’t mean it is dead. No one pushing this has lost their jobs and there have been no policy or budgetary changes that reflect that MMT is dead.

    Republicans aren’t even talking about lowering the rate of increase of government spending. After the election and prior to gaining control of the House, they went the opposite way and passed another enormous spending bill that increases debt and deficits. Biden is a horrible President with horrific policies and Republicans have went along with everything he wants, especially on spending.

    The only things Republicans have fought against are their own voters.

    1. The gold standard is actually worse theoretically. For example, instead of inflation being caused by elected officials that theoretically can be tossed out, it is caused by finding new gold mines, or asteroids, etc.

      Here is my modest proposal: use the SPY standard. Instead of having the dollar exchangeable for gold have it exchangeable for SPY shares. They at least in theory should move in roughly the same direction.

      But, the real failing is that no matter what it is “based on”, what really happens is that those in power print more money and give it to themselves/their friends. The failure mode in a floating currency is inflation, the failure mode of X-backed currency is currency crashes and devaluation.

      Moving to the “Gold Standard” is just like outlawing guns. If people were honest enough to follow the law, they wouldn’t need the law in the first place.

        1. That would also be better than gold as a standard, but it has the same problems – it requires the people printing the money to be honest.

          1. Everything requires a degree of honesty, but having the currency based on something at least gives something that we can check against. Smart investigative journalists (I know, all three of them that currently exist) can dig into whether the money supply really matches the amount of whatever the money is based on,while pure fiat currency is entirely based on trusting the central bank.

          2. “Everything requires a degree of honesty, but having the currency based on something at least gives something that we can check against. ”

            Again, the problem is the failure mode. If a currency is backed by a “thing”, by definition you can trade currency for that “thing” at a fixed rate. If the government cheats and prints one extra dollar (or North Korea does), someone figures that out and takes all the money in the economy and trades it for the “thing”, then trades the “thing” for something else and trades that for currency, making a gain every time this happens. So the first time someone correctly deduces that a cheating event has occurred, the entire economy’s wealth is transferred to the people that figured it out.

            Then you get people like Redacted, that figure this out and go print the money themselves so they can extract the economy’s wealth. I’ll give you a hint, he made his money destroying a currency and votes democrat.

            So, to sum up, fiat currency is actually better than currency “backed up” by something.

        2. Has anyone researched basing the currency on energy, outside of scifi?

          We are already racing towards that. With the highest value of energy being electricity because of its ease of conversion. So we move from cents and dollars to the quad?

          1. Whatever you used would need to be agnostic to the form of energy, so that might work. And, yes if you got more total energy, whether it be solar panels, wind, nuclear fission, or fusion, it would technically create inflation. However, since energy is a large part of the cost of virtually everything, the end result would likely be fairly stable prices.

          2. OTOH the push to green means one’s society might me prompted to be a net importer of energy rather than despoil the environment with messy means of production. So we end up with the same debt bomb plus inflation due to the consumption competition situation we are already in.

    1. Sorry, it is a exchange traded fund that follows the S&P500 – it is the largest market cap symbol in the world, at $350M. And the next 3 largest are knock-offs of SPY.

  5. I agree with wodun. I believe MMT is dead, but see no evidence that anywhere near a critical mass of those in authority share that belief.

  6. If MMT truly dies, we’ll see something else take its place. The resources you can steal from the US economy is too big an ideological target. Still if we can tie the next Big Thing to the last Dead Thing, maybe we can make them work for it.

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