Drs Stephanie Kelton and Bill Mitchell join Real Progressives 2020年2月18日
22:00〜25:00のケルトンの来歴が興味深い
Music] good evening friends at Steve with real progressives it's not a huge night for me personally hopefully you all will enjoy this as much as I we were able to get it not one but two of the original mmt development team two people who I have followed intensely for years and have found tremendous out in the message that both of these individuals bring it is singularly the driving force in my life right now and so the opportunity to have both dr. stephanie kelton and William bill Mitchell on here with me is just beyond words exciting um so I'm sure you guys didn't come to hear Steve talk so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to bring my guests on welcome to the show dr. Kelton and dr. Mitchell how are you tonight very well thank you thanks Steve doing fine how are you I'm doing great you guys thank you so much for this I cannot tell you how much this means to not just myself but the hundred-plus that we have that volunteer for real progressive them the 120,000 the follow our page etc we are very very grateful to have you both on here so let me just start off real quickly I've had the opportunity to interview dr. Mitchell several times and it never ever ever ceases to be exciting for me but this is the first time for us to have you on can you please just tell us a little bit last time you know we had talked about you you had been at UMKC and now you're at Stony Brook recently published a article and a white paper on student debt elimination being the great boon for our economy I want to talk about that a little bit later but can you tell us just a little bit about what's been going on with you here recently you've been very active on Twitter and I know our people really follow you closely not sure am I active I guess I guess I go through bouts where I feel a little bit more active on Twitter than I am sometimes yeah right I relocated it I took a new job I feel like that happens a lot to me lately but I hope maybe I'm settled for a little while so relocated the family changed jobs now launching a new center here at Stony Brook University called the Center for the Study of inequalities social justice and policy so that's exciting I've got one foot in political science public policy daughter and one foot in economics so and teaching courses that I haven't taught before public budgeting and finance policy with you know mmt running through the veins of everything that I do and you know I continue to be involved politically in some capacity and the trips back and forth to the hill and collaborating and doing those sorts of things so that's that's pretty much it that's quite a bit let's be fair that's quite a bit so without further ado let me let me ask you dr. Mitchell what have you been up to because last time we spoke you had put out your book reclaiming the state I know that you're working on mmt University I know you have a textbook coming out if it hasn't already come out what's going on with you sir what's up lately oh well just I have a work to really and but that's sort of par for the course I think but you know we're we're on we have sort of got a lot going on I'm still in the early stages of getting the MMT universities structure set up I'm still hoping to get that launched by to correspond to the release of our there's the next iteration of our textbook which was Randi ray myself and Martin watts which Macmillan ago telling us now they're publishing in November 2018 so it's gone back from sort of marched November but that's that's the way of the world in this sort of area a really interesting development I think is that the end of this week I'm heading to the Finland and I have a teaching position at the University of Helsinki in their political science program and I this and I they're using our introductory mmt textbook and so I'm giving six lectures there on mmt basically within the political science program and I'll have more to say about that later but it's been I think there's been some quite interesting internal relations within the university there between the Department of Economics and the Department of Political Science about my presence that I'll know more and know what more I can say later and then over the next the week I'm there for two weeks but in the intervening weekend I'm heading to Barcelona and there's a very active mmt groups groups in Spain and very strong activity in Barcelona and we're going to be giving a couple of presentations there to the you know and that's a that's a place where we're anti euro sentiment is rising strongly mmt based strong national sovereignty movement is there that needs to be tweaked a bit I think but you know we're doing that and so they're my latest sort of updates can I just while we're planting flags because I think this is pretty cool Bill's got flags planted all across Europe and elsewhere but just to say one more little flag we can plan I've taken a positions of visiting at the University of Ljubljana so each may I go to Slovenia and also get to do some lecturing and things like that they're very keen to have MIT have some representation there so that's that's good where will clear the will clear that eurozone and Beyond here shortly I think the message Steve is that we're now seeing a really a really international movement developing on a new part of it that is disseminating MMT to very broadly through political structures through trade union structures through just citizens and grassroots groups and there in cross cross languages I mean even in Germany now it's spreading in Germany has been a really hard you know I have very close contacts in Europe and Germany's been a hard not to crack but we're now getting traction there so I think we um we're on a winner here that's it that's this is a great set up for where I'm gonna go with it next so obviously I I got pulled into this in like 2009 and in 2009 just a level step for those who don't know this I lost the 17 year career at Verizon and you know I was an associate director level at a fortune company and life was great you know some was always shining they were getting me involved in great education and so forth but I had the slight problem going on and that slight problem was that I had just received an MBA from a standard institution and I learned all this economic stuff they took me through a lot of things and that was a right-winger at the time I'd really really come from the other side of the coin than I am now by far and in life really crumbled around me as it did for many people that fell down during the global financial crisis and I think the thing that really really makes this discussion we're about to have so important is that many people that follow real progressive are still struggling from the collapse from the crash and have never really gotten their feet under them and that's kind of what stirred me into action with this you know I I I really really followed doctor Kelton and yourself you guys wrote some incredible things and for me it was such a huge departure from what I had been taught from everything that I thought you know Here I am this guy has got two masters degrees I know everything right and I knew nothing I literally had to unlearn not everything there are still some things that were applicable but many of them were completely started in the wrong origins had the wrong you know you you come up with the wrong idea and you end up with the wrong solution and so understanding a little bit about mmt back then started planting seeds of hope and then come to find out you guys have been doing this for a lot longer than 2009 in fact you guys started well before that can you guys tell me both you dr. Mitchell and you Stephanie can you both kind of lay in to how you came to this understanding this lense of modern monetary theory and and where its origins were and and and how you came to really put your passions behind it I'll take whichever one wants to go first because I think that what happened is we will each have our own story and then we will at some point we will meet and the story will continue but I I would like to hear bill start he's okay very good dr. Mitchell well I'd also preferred to be if you calling dr. Kelton Stephanie yeah very formal of you look at look it's of its own there's vague origins and in my fourth year at Melbourne University in 1978 so that's in the honors year that were preparing for to go on to do postgraduate studies I wrote a I wrote a thesis about buffer stock in employment models and you know this this was really not mmt but it was about how the state can use its spending capacity to run both the full employment scheme plus a price stability scheme and for those who have read my work it was I got the idea sitting in a very wintry lecture theatre in Melbourne which for you guys wouldn't be very cold but for me is freezing and it was the lecture was in agricultural economics and it was about the Australian Government's buffer stock mall scheme where to guarantee the price of wool to give farmers a guaranteed income the the government would buy up all the surplus wool if the market didn't wanted wanted and they would sell it back into the market if the farm supply was deficient relative to demand and I wasn't so much interested in wool but it was clearly a full employment of Wolfskin and and I was interested in unemployment at the time because in the late 70s that was when basically the neoliberal period started in Australia and unemployment was starting to rise you know historically it had been less than 2% and started to rise five six and so on now that now that just sat there in my mind I wrote that and sat there and of course I was a you know post-keynesian and I believe in the use of deficits and all the rest of it but but then we met up in the early 90s I think about you history but you know the facts will correct me but let's say 93 94 something around that date the internet was becoming a reality and we'd move beyond the early bulletin boards into email lists and the an email list began called the post Keynesian theory list the pkt list and this was this was a fantastic thing because it completely eliminated the tyranny of distance between academics in because post-keynesian sooner minority we used to meet up maybe once or twice a year at different conferences but we didn't have regular you know exchanges we'd have to wait three or four weeks if you're in Australia for a letter to to read somebody or whatever and on that list we started talking about things about post Keynesian theory and one of the members of that list was warned and Warren had had just written a document he come from banking and in and financial markets and he had written a document called soft currency economics and within that document was part of that document was an outline of a full employment scheme which he called employer of last resort and of course that was the job guarantee scheme that I'd written about in 1978 and so that that immediately was very interesting to me and you know after I got a call one Saturday from this very American chapter on the phone saying look I'm in Sydney Omar and mostly I can't imitate an American accent he said I want to come and see you because and it was based upon what we've been writing in this mailing list and so Warren Julie headed up the highway to where I to Newcastle where I was at that stage and we had a really nice lunch and we talked about things and Warren brought a lot of knowledge of banking that that I didn't have you know I had I had the other sort of knowledge and and to me that was the beginning of my involvement in what later has become called mmt now Warren meanwhile back at the ranch was building was was bringing together people like as I understand it Randi Ryan Stephanie who were the very early ones he brought together Stephanie or correct me if I'm wrong but sooner son after I think it was in 1996 I can't remember the exact it was in your winter so it must it was early in the year or late in here we all made up in New York I don't know if stephanie was there was a it was a workshop sponsored by the new school and that was the first time that we had all come together physically and I'm saying all because the joke in those days was that you could count count the mm tears on one hand so we were only talking three or four of us got together at that workshop and that really began it and that so that's the origins of it then we started to write things and build a progressive sequentially build a coherent body of literature which which you now have in which we now call mmm tea now I could talk a later about the social media developments but that was that that were they came later in the sort of around 2004 but around 1994 the the the network was starting to be put together by different interactions which which we now see is the sort of academic and the intellectual beginnings and the internet intellectual group that began all of this 1994 I think it was very good all right so Stephanie let's talk how did you come into this mix well I you know I guess unlike you I had the good fortune of you know sort of ending up in an economics program with some people who prevented me from getting my head buttled with nonsense at a very early age and so I think that you know this story for me this journey doesn't begin without John Henry who was my professor at California State University in Sacramento years before because he's quite a bit older than I am Randi ray was also John Henry's student so we had this sort of parallel at Cal State Sacramento where we were both trained by this professor who was our you know history of economic thought was the course that I think was most impactful so I got exposed I was reading her original works of Veblen and Marx and Kings and you know that sort of captured my attention and that's what drew me into economics that and the fact that John Henry was just a tremendous influence intellectually an incredible professor and so forth and so through him I ended up meeting Randy who at that time was a professor at the University of Denver and Randy's John Henry set up a lunch and it introduced me to Randy just at the end of my undergraduate training and he said you should listen to this guy very smart he'll tell you what to do and John Henry said you know Stephanie is gonna go off to graduate school where should she go to school and Randy said she should go to Harvard and John said don't listen to him I said wait a minute the lunch is for me to listen to him he said no no no don't listen to him you need to go to Cambridge and then the the England Cambridge not the Massachusetts Cambridge so off I went to Cambridge and that's where I think I first ended up on this PPT this thoughtless that Bill was referring to earlier where people were dialoguing and Warren was part of that and Randy was part of that and so I did a degree at Cambridge University I missed this 1996 gathering at the new school because I was there studying at Cambridge but then I ended up on a fellowship from Cambridge University to the levy economics Institute by that time Randy had left Denver and joined levy when Godley was a scholar at the levy Institute I had this fellowship I went to levy and that's and I really started to dig into words work and that soft currency economics which bill referred to earlier was this bizarre little pamphlet and that's a little bit but I say bizarre as someone who had an unconventional training and so I was you know pretty open to the idea that things might not be what other people conventionally how they describe them but Warren stuff I have to say it just struck me as wrong it struck me as wrong and what Randi and I started going back and forth Randi was working on his book understanding modern money and I kept saying this isn't right this is a right Randy said well write it up you know you would want to know if it's wrong he would want somebody to point it out so you should write it up so I started digging into the really detailed stuff about government finance operations all this you know weedy stuff and I start tracing through the argument and I arrive at exactly the same place that Warren arrived I just made a much more complicated argument out of it and that's how I persuaded myself that Warren had that Warren was correct and that what he was describing about the way the modern monetary system works the operations the accounting and so forth that it was all very correct and that it really mattered that we were getting these things wrong so that's why simultaneously encounter Warren and when godly and all of that at levy and then you know the rest is history as they say we all ended up at UMKC together Randi that for static Arlena and I and and the burgeoning of the literature that Bill refers you know sort of funny that I think people still continue to treat mmt as an internet phenomenon it's something that happens in front of tweets and blog posts and something that in reality it's years our scholarly literature and as bill said that's what M&T is it's the label that we assign to the body of scholarly work that a handful of us spent years developing and the internet stuff came later when we wanted to enter the frame mostly for me anyway as part of the financial and during the financial crisis in the aftermath and we wanted to try to have a voice in those debates and we used social media to have that immediate impactful entry point to give us an opportunity to engage I want to just say you guys have the patience and stamina of gods it's amazing to me because I know just as a layperson there has a little bit of training dueling with with people that have run for president and and people that are running for office and and just the regular you know fanfare of the social media world but just trying to crack through and break through old things I mean I've been called a cult leader I've been called all kinds of like I'm selling a scam SIOP of this of that I have no idea what you just said which is it's an incredible huge body of scholarly work real honest-to-goodness forensic work that has nothing to do with Facebook or Twitter or anything else this is just a vehicle by which we have to use to get this word out which brings me to the next thing when I first met you Stephanie you had told me a little bit about the orthodoxy and how difficult it was for economists you don't tow the line of the the standard narrative how hard it was to get out there and get the word out there and I've spoken with Bill as well about this and quite frankly every mmt economists or post-keynesian who supports mmt and everyone to a fault has said how absolutely difficult it is to get this work published in mainstream journals to get through the myriad of politics within the academic structure you guys have been incredibly successful using heterodox communication methods to reach a heterodox community that's getting a relax economic lesson I guess this is a great opportunity now for both billing you to talk about that the internet phenomenon and some of the social media that you all have done over the years from new economic perspectives to billy blog and some of the other tools that you have used to get the word out to bypass some of these to get the word to the people i mean you all have done great great work I'll leave it up to both here to talk about Bill what what do you say well look kind you know for a long time there's small group of us were working on academic matters and that is and that that's our natural value okay we would we would go to conferences around the world in and not just heterodox conferences you know we'd go to the standard conferences around the world and give these papers I remember once I was a guest speaker at a major conference and a one of the panel discussion said oh we've been visited by a man from Mars today and and and that was you know that was sort of standard fare for what we're up against and often we just preach to the preach to the converted even within the post-keynesian community there was there was hostility and resentment and all these other things and resistance is the better best word I think and you know you know I mean it's quite clear that the the general we weren't weren't going to cut it with the general population pursuing that line we'd get a lot of publications or an amount and certain we'd retire and go off and you know deteriorate into our old age without ever having done anything much and I remember for various reasons I was fairly fairly plugged into IT developments and I wrote I wrote I write a lot of code I always have a sort of a technician and I got wind that there was this phenomenon called a blog it was just a very visible had come and said you know you should understand what this these new developments are this is pre Facebook pre tweets all of that stuff and I sort of you know cause I'm IT oriented I got interested in a blog and I remember I had a meeting in probably the Caribbean somewhere with Randy boy and I don't think you were there Stephanie but there was definitely Byron and Randy there and I announced it to the assemblage I said I'm gonna start a blog and I remember when he looked at me as if I was insane and he said what the hell's that and I said to him I said to him this is our path into the general discussion this is our path to take our literature out of the academic area where nobody would read it where there'll be zero traction in the public debate and this is our path into the public debate 2004 yeah that's my first blog I started my first blog in 2004 and that became my vehicle III at that stage I I don't think I wrote it daily but I wrote it a fair a fair amount pretty much daily and prolific bill yeah but but don't overstate that but and then then of course I started to get Warren and Randy said to me will what's your traffic like and I started to get a lot of traffic I went from you know 40 people reading my blog who were in my academic network to literally thousands and then tens of thousands and then more and that and then Stephanie developed the Kansas City new economic perspectives and it went from there and now we get millions of hits across our network on a daily basis and then of course other forms of social media came along and stephanie has exploited Twitter much more than I have and that's just a taste thing I think and even Warren sends out tweets these days Randy doesn't but only Randy started on it's funny because your blog was very much the pioneer for us but years later 2009 after the financial crisis after it became clear that this was not going to be a garden-variety recession we were dealing with something very different here I wanted a staff at least in the policy debate in particular and I knew that blogging was you know like a full-time job I knew that it took a lot of dedication I and I was paying attention to my bill was doing and I understood then I did not have the bandwidth to do what he does or the dedication so I went to Randy to bill black and I said if I start a blog will and it's the three of us and we take turns and we're all contributing would you to contribute and Randy said to me what's a blog so after five years he still apparently had not figured out exactly what he's what this platform was but yeah so that's when I launched I think July of 2009 specifically in response to the crisis and as a way to get you know me you can't does no good to work on a paper send it in have it going to review a year and a half two years later if you're lucky it comes out in print you can't engage in policy debates like that you know in the midst of a crisis you have to be in the moment and the blog was the perfect it was the perfect platform for us very good so let me let me ask this next question in terms of the flavor of both of your writing I'm going to tell you from from the outside you all have unique styles obviously but the one thing that you both consistently do is you consistently dress down neoliberalism you consistently talk about you know knocking down the pay-fors and eliminating wasted efforts and I Stephanie you you have one of my favorite I'm gonna butcher it but the point is you've talked about the folks it was especially within the Democratic Party leaving the headstones I have this almost memorized I'm gonna butcher it now the headstones of the progressive agenda basically trying to find ways to pay for it and and and and Bill you wrote one of my favorite articles of all time is like about tax payers literally fund nothing but one back Stephanie you wrote what is obviously the go-to paper and you sent it to me when I asked you to taxes fun spending and you said huh no and you gave me your link to the white paper the Stephanie Bali I think was 1998 white paper were you it was titled do taxes and bonds financed government spending and and it was incredible it was a dense read for shorts not just for light reading but it was incredibly detailed and it is absolutely life-changing once the light bulb goes on can you all talk to the audience a little bit about what neoliberalism is and how we have leveraged or you have particularly your work is leveraged MMT to to eliminate the the pain and suffering of the neoliberal push to privatization etc it's definitely I'll let you start if you don't mind very and in all I'm going on neoliberalism I'm gonna let him take this question but it's funny that paper that you're referring to it's a peer-reviewed journal article that I wrote that's the paper I started working on to show Warren why he was wrong that's what that paper was so I thought if you know he took a couple of what I perceived to be shortcuts and I thought well if you fill in all the gaps that you know he sort of glosses over a step here or a step there you'll arrive in a different place and so it's funny that that paper was impactful for you because it was impactful for me because it's what allowed me to to convince myself and that's what I had to do I actually wasn't enough for me to have warrants a mystic how it works I had to convince myself that everything I thought I understood about government finance and operations was incorrect and I had to do the work to persuade myself I was wrong so anyway I love Bill to hit the neoliberal question well it's that type of bother why Stephanie is a great type of that but that was one of them there were there were several early Keystone sort of papers that we all individually or together wrote in different co-authoring arrangements and that was one of the sort of pillars I think great paper look it's quite it's quite obvious that the narratives that began in different countries at different times in the 1970s that self regulating markets will deliver prosperity for all was an ideological statement rather than a factual statement now if you trace the history and in in both the last two books I've written I've written a bit about this the it all began in the late late 60s when you know profits profits were being squeezed by by what the corporate let's call it the capital sector soare as being an excessive wealthiest a full employment at empowered trade unions allegedly welfare stated May given options to workers to resist pernicious working conditions and that taken together this sort of government program to undermine the advantages that capital enjoys by being capital it gone far too far and like you know in the in the Australian setting for example the release of archived cabinet papers you know 50-year rules where they get released after fifty years or something in 1968 you know we we've now got letters written by top industrialists in Australia to the treasurer purging the treasurer to create some unemployment so that would take the wind out of the trade union sales so this is this was a conspiracy and it is now over but you know I'm not I know I'm not a paranoid type but this was a clear coordinated effort by capital to undermine the things that have been gained by by the rest of the population the workers and their families in the post Second World War period up to the mid 70s or something and you know dilute the the the Lewis power manifesto in the u.s. context 1971 you know he later became soon after was appointed by President Nixon to Supreme Court as you all know in America and became the most conservative Supreme Court judge in history as I understand it but his manifesto laid out a very coherent plan to to regain the hegemony or the capacity of capital to exploit the economy in their own interests without compromising it with workers you know he was good day he told capital that they had to in take over the media they had to take over educational programs infiltrate educational grams and had to take a get a voice on the Supreme Court to turn that into a pro capital conservative organization and very very importantly he outlined a strategy for the development and funding of the tanks which were a relatively unknown phenomenon at that stage and of course in the 70s after that you saw the springing up like like mushrooms all of these conservative think tanks all around the world which were well-funded by financial capital and the industrial capital in the you know the cop brothers case in America and these were full time 24/7 propaganda machines pumping out all of this stuff and included in that stuff was not only that workers were lazy and you know the Enron type narrative but we'll also all of this macroeconomic stuff that that was squarely in our in our bailiwick and so you know MMT the the development of our literature had to meet that Square on had to had to address those macroeconomic myths because to be fair the mainstream post-keynesian literature before him empty hadn't really nailed the myths of neoliberalism so in in that mainstream post kinds in literature and if Stephanie talks about hours where we had the deficit doves and these were this was a concession to the mainstream in my view that you know we can run deficits sometimes but but we've always got to pay for them and go back to surplus to pay for them because otherwise you know financial markets will will attack the government's ability and you know stop funding them and blah blah so up until you know the point that we came along to develop this literature there hadn't in my opinion being a square on a head-on attack on all of those macroeconomic myths the post-keynesian up until they're not in my view presented a compromised picture and so that's been an agenda for sure and because that's the main game all of these other things about identities and you know identity issues are not unimportant you know like guys and gender and ethnicity they're very important things but but what's that but for us the mind game was the macro economics which forms the the sort of basis of all of those other attacks on disadvantage absolutely so let me let me ask you all a couple questions obviously when you look across we are not making politically we're not making progress I'm not seeing legislation passed we're not seeing the people taken care of we're seeing a lot of energy we're seeing the people growing weary of the same tired do-nothing gridlock whatever but when you talk at the non-academic level and you go down a few pegs into the activist world etc we're stricken with a million forms of hieroglyphics on caveman walls like worries about the petrodollar oh my god the US is going to implode the petrodollar we're all going to die and then it's like well if you just keep spending money on everybody we're all going to die from hyperinflation look at Zimbabwe look at you know Argentina Venezuela you know via our republic and you've got these traditional go twos that people think they're clever they threat of us actually like we've never heard it before but in fairness you guys have written extensively about this as well one of the things that I don't think I can find anywhere however is is kind of like a description of mmm T's view of the patch dollar since this seems to be something that comes from the Rampal world and the sound money world and quite frankly you even hear media personalities like Li camp and Jimmy Dore and others talk about this as well can you address what the petrodollar is what it is not and whether it's anything to be of great concern about any one of you Stephanie would you like to take a crack at it I can't sure I'm lost bill I can't see him and I miss most of the last part of this response to you you know he is on the screen so it may just be an issue of the be live studio he is his vocals cut out so I wasn't able to hear everything that he said okay I'll give you that that is an area I know I've not contributed much of anything maybe in some of the public speaking that I do with investment groups and things like that questions about the role of the dollar as a reserve currency petrol status and this sort of stuff will come up I think bill has written some on this and I know Warren has occasionally had shared thoughts I don't think maybe developed in a in the form of a post or anything like that but look at the end of the day what mmt has argued is that the value of the currency is driven by its acceptability and payment statement right mostly the public accident but other forms of payment as well does it matter whether the rest of the world prices oil in dollars in order for the u.s. to be to have the fiscal capacity to maintain full employment domestically to avoid austerity need have and the answer is no right are you hearing me start getting like the point of your question right people will sometimes say this but well what if the rest of the world refused to take dollars what if they begin price of oil in Deraa or some other currency or a basket fuzzums doesn't that them the MMT narrative which says the government is not constrained in the way of households or private business is that it can always maintain full employment domestically by relaxing fiscal policy to the point where you're maximizing employment and production of health and so we we explain the no it doesn't matter whether the US dollar is the quote unquote reserve currency that's not what makes mmt work in the u.s. it doesn't matter whether the rest of world prices oil in u.s. dollars as not what makes mmt work in the US your comment earlier I did want to just say something about this because this idea or maybe this was built talking about you know these these intense debates that we have in the u.s. between the deficit hawks and the deficit doves and what he characterized as in a sense shortcomings in the literature before MMP economists came into the into the debate we're you know Jamie Galbraith described it as a debate between Tweedledum and Tweedledee where you know it was basically austerity now versus austerity later and the best that the deficit doves could offer was an argument that deficits are okay it would sure be nice if we could avoid them but sometimes the economy just gets out of whack and if things you know aggregate demand gets so weak that you need government to step in and essentially prime the pump do a little bit of deficit spending put the foot on the gas but then recognize that as the economy begins to recover as Paul Hartman said just last week in piece that now is not the time to have fiscal stimulus in the form of the recent tax cuts and then the budget deal between you know the House and Senate for three billion and now top of infrastructure we said if anything right now we should be paying down debt which is crazy right which is to say that we the budget should actually be in surplus right now so I know I I touched on your question but tried to rap in a little bit of comment that I wanted to get in about what bill was saying about you know this deficit Doug's don't take us very far essentially the debate is austerity now Paul Ryan types or austerity later you know the the deficit dove times and that doesn't extra very good macroeconomic policy no it does not know what do you have on the petro dollar well it's it's sort of not much it's irrelevant look you know at the end of the day i any nation ultimately is as no sound you don't you definitely can't hear me oh yes your bill yeah he's there the yeah he's there I'll translate look look the basic principle is start with is that any country is only able to achieve the prosperity with its own real resource base independent of trade that's the sort of base the limiting condition so then you if you if you've hardly got any real resources then you're likely to be poor and there's not much you can you can but you can do some trading to get some other real resources and swap them and you can perhaps improve that real resource capacity but ultimately a country that can't get access to essential resources say like energy petrol for example is going to have difficulties that's that's a reality that doesn't say anything about mmm see what mmt tells us is it irrespective of your real resource endowments a national government can ensure that all of the real resources that are for sale in the currency that in the issues can be fully used in a productive way now that doesn't mean that every country can be highly prosperous it means that they can whatever the limiting prosperity is that's the first point the second point is that this idea and I read it even on the progressive side that the only reason the US government can run deficits is because it's in some some way the reserve currency that's just a nonsensical statement Australian dollar isn't a reserve currency we've been running deficits 80 or 90 percent of our history and other countries don't have any attraction to speculators or people who want to you know conduct holding trades or whatever in that particular currency they can run deficits a national government that issues its own currency can always run a deficit and never needs to and I'm I hope you can see these these commas fund it never needs to fund it irrespective and and so this idea that the the MMT is sort of just a u.s. construction is really really wrong and and and the the corollary of that or the and the the related statement is that I renamed I've often heard over the over the last 20 years now ah mm tea just applies to small clothes I'm sorry large closed economies like the US well no it doesn't I happen to live in a relatively small very open economy which can have terms of trade shifts that knock out you know 10% of GDP in two quarters in value terms because of revaluing exports and imports and mmt applies to every nation that issues its currency and every nation that doesn't issue its currency like the eurozone countries it's just that the implications of the currencies urines will change across those two types of currency arrangements so I just think the whole idea that look the US might find that its own energy resources become more expensive over time and it will have to make decisions but that's got nothing to do with the capacity of the national government to fully utilize all the available resources that are for sale in u.s. dollars whether they be priced at in foreign markets or just available in the US markets okay so bill just finished up talking about the reserve currency and the fact that we as nations rely on our real resources our access to real resources it's the whole idea of reserve currency and petro dollar etc is just nonsense it doesn't really have anything to play here so let me let me bring this up here because we're coming up on the hour and this is probably the most important thing to me anyway is the the concept of a progressive agenda and being able to do something truly bold and not just dinking and dunking around the edges but really making impact in people's lives and you know we I I go back and I feel like we've got a very very solid basis by which to leverage a progressive agenda going back to FDR second Bill of Rights going back to you know Martin Luther King talking about a job guarantee coming through here even recently during 2016 we had a remarkable agenda that everybody loved through the primaries and here we are now today going into 2018 let's talk what does a progressive agenda look like and how does one get a new deal what what types of energy and end factors would we need to push forward to get such a wonderful thing for our lives and quite frankly mmt to me is the the ultimate it is the magic silver bullet if you will in overcoming all the objections that are typically thrown at us in order to have a robust progressive agenda Stephanie can you talk about you know from the student debt elimination paper that you guys recently wrote through some of the other policy for script what what are we looking at here what does a progressive agenda look like with an understanding of mmt beneath it yeah it's not possible without an understanding of MNT I think I believe that completely there is no progressive agenda with this you know deficit-neutral CBO passing out permission slips for every piece of legislation that would give us universal health care or a veteran job guarantee or you know making public colleges and universities tuition-free whatever the case may be climate let's take climate change if you think that you're gonna do anything meaningful which is the only thing we can do when it comes to climate and responding appropriately to the to the threat that we face with respect to climate change we're not going to do it in a deficit neutral way it just isn't going to happen and we're never going to have a piece of legislation that the Congressional Budget Office will run through its models and give a budget score that tells members of Congress you know what it's okay to vote for this because it doesn't add too much to deficits in the national debt over time that will never happen so either you recognize that you've got to go beyond the conventional self-imposed constraints with respect to the way we think about money and financing of government operations the dangers regarding running budget deficits or adding to the national debt we've got to move beyond all of that where there is no progressive agenda and in a very real way the clock is ticking on this and we can't mess around so and I put climate at the top of the list but there are other imminent dangers you mentioned student loan debt yes Scott full Weiler Marshall Steinbaum and Kathryn Rusch 'ln and I spent over a year and a half working on this paper was a labor of love but it salmon's a real problem facing millions of people in this country there are 44 million people who have outstanding student loan debt not all of them are struggling to make their payments but a great many of them are and this is a significant issue for millions of people not just those that have student loan debt but their loved ones their partners their siblings their parents grandparents in some cases who co-signed on student loans and and so what is the progressive agenda look like you mentioned second bill of rights I like that very much a right to a job FDR put first on the list every everyone in America who is the ones to work should be afforded the the right to employment the right to a job and then he goes on to say at a wage that is a living wage at a wage that has proper remuneration that you can subsist right you're not in poverty if you're working full time a right to housing a right to health care a right to a secure retirement and just go down the list I think the progressive agenda is mostly there now he didn't have climate I would definitely add that but this is the unfinished business for the Democratic Party this is a man who was elected four times and and he left us the blueprint and said this is the direction that I would like to see party move in and we can round that out with things that address student loan debt and the climate and other things but I think we have a pretty good catch of what a progressive agenda would look like we can't get there from here in other words you know I worked for senator Sanders you know this he talked non-stop about the problems with establishment economics establishing any economics does not provide you a framework that's compatible with the progressive agenda and mmt does is the framework a macroeconomic framework that is a companion that's compatible with that big bold agenda that would give us a progressive like the one I think you would like to see and I would like to see that's that's fantastic I mean I want to stand up in here Dell we have talked at length about this you you have I'm very very much in line with both you and dr. Kelton Stephanie excuse me um talk to us a little bit because this is this is one of the things I wanted to weave in here and we've done it over and over again so I feel really good about it but mmt is now us phenomenon it's a global phenomenon and a progressive agenda doesn't just live within the borders of the United States we have Jeremy Corbyn in the UK that needs to get a little mmt into his world we've got the australian government that needs to get a little mmt in their world and all across the world we have a little bit of mmt that needs to penetrate so that people lead a better life and you know obviously Fidel kaboom and Gonzaga have done great work in trying to leverage a job guarantee for developing nations etc talk to me a little bit about what your vision as an Australian who travels around what does a progressive agenda look like to you sir yeah well I read over night that Jeremy Colvin was a secret tickles of archaeans by the Warsaw Pact and unfortunately the Czech government has now said that the archives don't say anything the sword so it's a tabloid UK beat up when they're when they're basically losing the battle that's what's happening these days but look the look I would just take what Stephanie has said except to say that that different nations have different histories and different institutional structures and so what what what constitutes a a progressive agenda will will be conditioned a bit by that so in the Australian you know the u.s. is a particular Anglo country whereas say the UK Australia New Zealand and Canada as a more alike as Anglo countries any institutional structure etc and one of the examples of that for example is the extent of public enterprise history of public enterprises within the other angle I countries I mentioned relative to say the US and so we've had a history of public transport public energy provision public water provision and these large infrastructures that delivered very reliable very good services to people at at prices that they could afford and those sort of agendas were those sort of services were bastardized by the near Liberals have been by privatization by outsourcing they've become fragmented profit-seeking unreliable inefficient destructive for prosperity type services and so you know a progressive agenda in in my country or the UK I mean Jeremy called monster green ashen Eliza railways and the water water system delivery systems and that's not inconsistent right Stephanie says it's just a specific nuance for different institutional histories if you like that we've got and and and what the overarching goal of a progressive agenda has to be is that the government is us and the economy is us and that our agent the government has to stop being a agent of capital which it has become under neoliberalism and become a mediator in the capital labor struggles and and and work so that it uses its capacity as our age and the people not the 1% or the 10% but the people to deliver prosperity with the resources available to it for all people and adding includes inclusion equity eliminate social exclusion eliminate transfer of national income to profits and all of those things and make sure that we've all got us that that our our labor is rewarded and we've all got a stake in real resources that are being used that's that's sort of the overarching progressive I'm in my view and what that means in specifics will depend upon what country you're in but there's there's some things that affect us all and climate changes huge and and that's not historic or institutionally specific but you know the things as Stephanie mentioned are pretty common all around the world okay so let's let's go ahead and weird little over time if we're okay we'll keep going for a little bit longer Stephanie one of the things that everybody wants to know and this is because this is the it's almost hilarious that it keeps coming up but do taxes fun spending just simple answer at what level federal level you've got some fun federal spending you know what's funny I die I bet this is coming from this guy he won't let this go I had a guy Naomi I think he asked me on Twitter do taxes fund government spending federal government and I responded no and he printed it out and mailed it to me in a really beautiful like so it wouldn't bend or crinkle at all and send me a note and asked me to sign the printed response to his tweet and mail it back to him in the same prepackaged what apparently this is this is something that they need reinforced and I don't know how else to say this is the point of the paper we talked about earlier do taxes and bonds finance government spending that was the title of the paper and the responses no they do not and it's it's a little but operationally if they cannot that's right all right thank you so much that was beautiful and and though let me ask you let's get you on the well I want to comment on that oh please do yes and you know a center among the young several hundred emails I get a day the I've got one the other day telling me that I was had rocks in my head and they sent me to some monetary side in America that said the MMT is just plain wrong this is uh you know the monetary group in America and they said that mmt is completely wrong because quite obviously the federal treasury can't spend it there's not money in a certain account now it's really important to for for mmt people not to fall into traps when they're out there at dinner parties or wherever arguing it out and the the the important point is that you've got to distinguish between intrinsic characteristics of a monetary system which mmt is clearly excessive done is clearly exposed very in a very detailed way we've you've got to distinguish between those intrinsic characteristics and whatever accounting follies or tricks or conventions governments impose upon themselves at any particular time so it may be and it certainly is in Australia and I know it is it elsewhere that the government has a rule that says okay X this will account for these tax receipts into this account and then when that account is in a certain state we'll spend from this account and that's just an accounting fiction if you like and that then leads people to say that I will obviously these tax payer that the tax receipts are necessary to fund the government spending because there's some sort of voluntary tax convention it's but accounting convention that the departments of Finance or whatever for whichever country we're talking about have imposed upon themselves well that's such a superficial that's no understanding of the intrinsic characteristics of the monetary system that's just a description of the and you know typically these are ideological constructs these accounting conventions and they change over history we've got examples in Australia where they altered the way they auctioned off government bonds to take them take the central bank's ability to directly purchase government bonds for non-monetary purposes to make sure they're they're purely auctioned to the private sector and when a when that was asked when the official in charge was asked well why did you do that he said well we want to do impose discipline on government spending that's ideological it was just as justice an institutional structure imposed upon the reality and so when we say the taxpayers fund spending well of course the government doesn't need receipts from the non-government sector to in order to spend that's ridiculous to think that but the accounting structures that they put in place lead people who only want a superficial awareness to make that conclusion very good all right so let's finish this thing off here real quick because we're we're over time and I do appreciate both of your time our our team is built to deliver policy education activism and media we try our best to pull in all the best people that we possibly can and we try desperately to get as much information out as often as we can to progressives wherever they are that's the whole point of quote-unquote real progressives is that we're the true north were progressive and we don't care what party you're in because you know one of the great things that started this movement if you will this progressive movement going through the 2016 primaries and into present is the fact that it wasn't just one party or another it was independents pouring into this it was greens for us and other groups so believing in this idea and this mission in this this concept of a progressive revolution if you will that we were all won and I want to get that back no matter what come hell or high water I want progressives to unite behind what we all know and love which is like you said Stephanie the environment health care normal living things like we don't want to drive our car over a bridge that falls apart in the Midway we need our infrastructure built out we don't want to be carrying a second mortgage just so that we can go to college so we can get a job so education is a big deal there how would you suggest to individuals obviously voting but what would you what would you impart to them as to how they can impact races to get the word out to people what is the best way we have a motto called each one teach one it's the best we can do I don't know what more to do what any insights there on how to spread the word I mean I think that you're exactly thinking in the right direction you're you're doing it correctly you're getting people engaged you're talking about issues I think that that that's exactly the right thing to do people are deeply concerned Americans understand that something's not right they do they understood it with the last election as well they did not choose the candidate who said America is already great and things are fine and we're just gonna leave it on autopilot and you know there's no there no real big problems to fix we can tinker around the edges I think that many people understand that something is fundamentally wrong and how do you change the system you know I think you're doing it right I think that I I'm persuaded by the argument that big change does not come from the top down it comes from the bottom up that it takes people getting engaged that it takes people mobilizing organizing meetups chat groups talking each one teach one is a terrific sounding motto and even better in practice look at these young people in Florida look what they're doing right just a small group of teenagers after this horrible mass shooting the other day and they took to social media they've taken the narrative bites throat they're not letting go of it they're gonna pound away and pound away they're organizing events and and they're saying this is our future right I think young people have a particularly important role to play here and so I think it's not what is the best way is I think what your question was I don't think there is a best way I just think there are a lot of ways and people need to be engaged on a lot of different fronts running for office talking with their friends and their colleagues getting engaged little things knocking on doors writing letters making phone calls pushing pushing pushing and when you hear the wrong arguments being made and you've arrived at the point where you can see that clearly and you understand why they're wrong say something you know when you see something say something that goes for economics as well you don't have to have an advanced degree in this stuff to be able to call out wrong economic arguments when you see and hear them write a letter to the editor stand up in a town-hall meeting and say that's wrong and I know why it's wrong you're in a gold standard world or you're feeding us a line you know there's this isn't the way it works and forced a narrative to change that's fantastic bill bill look I think I think the first the first thing is patience and I remember back to our early group in the early 90s and it might have been a cultural thing but my American colleagues Warren and Randy and Stephanie were very enthusiastic and I said look this is going to take a long time because you know and that enthusiasm was sort of understandable because it's just I self-evident the understandings that mmt delivers are just so self-evident it just becomes unbelievable that the whole world trades on fake knowledge that's delivered by my profession the students go to universities and they learn fake knowledge and they take it into the into their jobs in the government into financial markets into industry and they trade on fake knowledge it's an unbelievable thing and so that natural enthusiasm for our early group was understandable but you know I'm on I was less optimistic I thought it was going to take a long time and someone once said isn't it that if you want to have big changes all the old people have to die off first I can't remember who said that but someone said it and what what I understood to be my role would be to you know I've got no marketing skills or stuff like that I'm a writer and as you know that's my role and so I saw moe and I've often been asked you know well why aren't you doing more to market this and and I said well I don't I'm not a market I'm a writer I'm an intellectual AK I'm an academic and so I think what we're seeing is over time as this agenda is unfolding we're now seeing second generation in empty as you guys Steve and all of your followers who have a broader a broad range of skills and capacities that that I don't think that I have and certainly Raggedy Ann Warren haven't gone and Stephanie's sort of bridges the gap better than we do but there's this there's a multitude of if you think about the way the monetarists and the neo Liberals took took dominance in the 70s they didn't do it through just the work of Milton Friedman and he's got gang they did it for you the think tanks which were and other other organizations which had incredible array of very sophisticated skills to create narratives to create frames to create new languages they use social psychology and all the rest of it and we're in where we're now in the midst of all of that and it's really important that guys like you broaden your skill bases and bring in more and more people that can can distill the sort of intellectual ideas that that us we develop into inter narratives for people and I try to do it on my blog but I know that it's that it doesn't succeed in the same way as apathy one sentence statement on Twitter does but but that's my role and your role is different and and very important and equally important now and you're doing fine in my view we've just got to do more of it and as Stephanie said I think that people are starting there was a reason in the late 19th century the trade unions formed and welfare states became realities there was a reason and that is because people got sick to death of poverty and oppression arising from the classical liberal period that's why I trade unions form workers got pissed off by by being sand under cotton Jenny's and dot and their children dying and all of that and we're we're back to that again in a way you know the the the right or whatever you want to call the nearly balls of God starting to get a well ahead of themselves and the people are pissed off and so there's a massive capacity now to to change the narrative to change the frames and I'm not seeing it on the internet all the nice and empty sites with nice little graphics and cartoons and you know pithy little explanations that's the next generation and we were there now just do more of it so let me let me take this moment I owe my team a bit of since we have a very large audience today first things first I want to thank my team I want to thank you to both for joining us but we have a huge amount of volunteers that work their butts off seven days a week and really really do everything the things that you don't even see working in spreadsheets making phone calls making memes creating videos share and wait and everything and and they show up to events and they fly around on their own dime and they're really really working hard to bring this up and I would I'm not going to be able to name them all but I do want to say real quickly just in this last week as a matter of fact yesterday we actually announced a merger with revolt against plutocracy who are the originators of the Bernie herb us to pledge and so we now will be working with a true 527 super PAC that will be able to fundraise for candidates and be able to push this message out there and currently the they are pushing what we call the contract for American renewal and it addresses the great we scrubbed it over it doesn't have the job guarantee in it which if we were starting from the beginning that would have been there but it has a lot of other very very valuable things that that we all would agree to so I want to give a shout out to Victor Tiffany and his team from revolt who have now joined up with us as our activism pillar and Stephanie and bill it was a pleasure meeting you both in Kansas you guys are truly and I say this without an ounce of fanboy I am in all of you both you guys have done tremendous work and you've given me a tremendous amount of hope and I will do everything in my power for what it's worth to help get this message out and about you you have my word on that I'll do the best I can to get it going thank you tireless at thanks so much for everything all of your team and you thank you very very much and Bill thank you sir as well I'm gonna go ahead and bid you guys both a farewell and thank you so much for coming to us have a great time travel safely and we'll talk soon see you later underneath everybody all right folks thank you so much for joining up with us tonight this was a tremendous opportunity I have never had such a great opportunity if my life and I've gotten to talk to every one of these folks so I hope you guys got something from this this is what real progressives aims to do is to bring you real knowledge not fake knowledge not gibberish but things you can hang your hat on and take to the streets and activate so without further ado I bid you adieu I want to thank you all once again and with that good night everybody you 英語 (自動生成) Drs Stephanie Kelton and Bill Mitchell join Real Progressives to present the world of #MMT 2,540 回視聴•2018/02/18 にライ
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