Ezra's piece is worth reading, though his description of MMT is puzzling. MMT is not about gov being able to spend what it wants b/c it can "print money to pay its debts." What MMT is actually about is, well, the substance of what @ezraklein calls "supply-side progressivism". 1/
In my book, I introduced the concept of "mission-oriented budgeting". The idea is to *start with where you want to end up* and then work backwards to show how you're actually going to get there. As Alec Stapp (quoted in Ezra's piece) put it, focus on "the ends of production." 3/ pic.twitter.com/odvDkIlVF3
Here's an example of me doing this is at a conference on a Green New Deal, where I ask the audience to "think like a beaver." The point is to start with the mission (building a dam) and then work out how to resource it. 4/ vimeo.com/359778899
新しいツイートを表示会話Stephanie Kelton@StephanieKelton·19分Agree completely with @ezraklein here. We have not seen anything like this from the Biden administration. 6/128Stephanie Kelton@StephanieKelton·19分But I wrote a whole piece about how the Biden administration could go MUCH bigger *if* it could shift gears and stop thinking about how to "pay for" the spending in conventional terms. 7/nytimes.comOpinion | Biden Can Go Bigger and Not 'Pay for It' the Old WayBy focusing on how much revenue they hope to raise from tax increases on the well-off, Democrats risk limiting the scope of their ambitions.1211Stephanie Kelton@StephanieKelton·19分The problem with the way that virtually everyone on the left is trying to justify another fiscal package, is that they're all suggesting that deficit neutral = inflation neutral--it doesn't! A point I stress emphatically in The Deficit Myth.
But I wrote a whole piece about how the Biden administration could go MUCH bigger *if* it could shift gears and stop thinking about how to "pay for" the spending in conventional terms. 7/ nytimes.com/2021/04/07/opi…
The problem with the way that virtually everyone on the left is trying to justify another fiscal package, is that they're all suggesting that deficit neutral = inflation neutral--it doesn't! A point I stress emphatically in The Deficit Myth. 8/ pic.twitter.com/aST6SEocZP
I realize that some consider it uncouth to point this out, as it gives "aid and comfort" to opponents of a GND. Suffice it to say (for now) that I disagree with these sentiments. It is better to get the economics right than to mislead the public. 9/ nytimes.com/2022/02/11/opi…pic.twitter.com/BojReVyR7A
8/1312Stephanie Kelton@StephanieKelton·19分I realize that some consider it uncouth to point this out, as it gives "aid and comfort" to opponents of a GND. Suffice it to say (for now) that I disagree with these sentiments. It is better to get the economics right than to mislead the public. 9/ https://nytimes.com/2022/02/11/opinion/folk-economics-monetary-policy.html?referringSource=articleShare…
1310Stephanie Kelton@StephanieKelton·19分So again, MMT isn't about "printing money to pay its debts." It's about understanding the monetary system and the mechanics of government finance well enough to not get bamboozled in an exchange like this one.
So again, MMT isn't about "printing money to pay its debts." It's about understanding the monetary system and the mechanics of government finance well enough to not get bamboozled in an exchange like this one. 10/ stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/jon-stewart-…
Stephanie Kelton@StephanieKelton·19分It's about understanding that government "borrowing" isn't borrowing in the sense that most people understand the term.
ft.comCan governments afford the debts they are piling up to stabilise economies?Two experts debate the long-term impact on inflation of the Covid-19 rescue packages1218Stephanie Kelton@StephanieKelton·19分And it's about understanding that there are alternatives to raising interest rates to bring down inflation and that rate hikes might even have perverse effects. http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/01/functional-finance-and-the-debt-ratio-part-iv.html
12/
neweconomicperspectives.orgFunctional Finance and the Debt Ratio—Part IVBy Scott Fullwiler[Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3] [...] [Part 5]This five part series will explore at length (warning!) and in detail (another warning—wonk alert!) the MMT perspective on the debt
And it's about understanding that there are alternatives to raising interest rates to bring down inflation and that rate hikes might even have perverse effects. neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/01/functi…. 12/
515Odds and Sets Soccer Cards@OddsandSets·7分返信先: @StephanieKeltonさん, @ezrakleinさんEzra should know better considering his wife's research on Universal Basic Income.Jeffery Denton@jimdiljes·6分返信先: @StephanieKeltonさん, @ezrakleinさんYou seem to be the only one who can accurately describe mmt without sounding condescending and it's nice to know that even controlled opposition doesn't have the guts to try to tell you you're saying it wrong 🤣🤣🤣David Castor@dpcastor·2分返信先: @StephanieKeltonさん, @ezrakleinさんSomeone should write a book or something. 😉
The coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing economic fallout is a global emergency, and governments around the world are responding with exceptional measures normally reserved for wartime. Since the beginning of March, the Federal Reserve has expanded its balance sheet by trillions of dollars, providing cheap credit to entities as diverse as the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, junk-rated companies, small businesses, and municipalities. Monthly federal government outlays spiked to nearly $1 trillion in April, about 2.5 times the prior 12-month average, as the government provided income support to businesses and to tens of millions of newly-unemployed workers, as well as one-time payments to households. And the government has also been coordinating the activities of the private sector, ordering manufacturers to produce ventilators, redistributing scarce supplies of hand sanitizer, and buying food directly from farmers to give to consumers.
Stephanie Kelton would probably have done some things differently, but she couldn’t have asked for a better political and economic backdrop for her new book, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy. While the book is structured as a rebuttal to common misconceptions held by politicians and the general public about government finance, it is ultimately a plea to use permanent wartime mobilization for civilian ends.
To Kelton, an economist at Stony Brook University and the most effective popularizer of Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT, the government must take the lead in “building a care economy” by shifting tens of millions of workers out of their current occupations and reallocating capital across industries. Rationing, wage and price controls, financial repression, and massive amounts of new federal spending are all necessary to address the challenges of climate change, unaffordable health care, an aging society, and, most importantly, joblessness. Wartime policies, according to Kelton, should no longer be considered exceptional emergency measures, but part of the normal toolkit. The rest of the book is there to remind readers that this is possible.
The most important passage occurs early on, when Kelton describes her first meeting with Warren Mosler, a hedge fund manager who now lives in St. Croix for tax reasons. He is considered the founder of MMT and has funded many of the organizations that provided a home for MMT academics. Mosler tells Kelton that he understood the nature of money when he offered to pay his children in business cards in exchange for chores such as cleaning the house and washing his sports cars.
At first, they had no interest in doing real work in exchange for worthless paper, but Mosler was able to compel them by demanding they pay him in business cards if they wanted to watch TV or swim in the pool. Mosler bent others to his will by creating a need for something only he could provide.
Advocates often try to cast MMT either as a technical subject focused on the plumbing of the financial system, or as a liberating doctrine that can “improve life for all of us,” as Kelton puts it. Mosler’s story reveals that MMT is ultimately a doctrine about power and its uses. Money is valuable because it is backed by force. Governments can spend as much as they wish, as long as they can compel the populace to provide the desired goods and services. The state has no “financial constraints,” only shortages of workers and raw materials to command. “Sovereignty”—a word that appears about once every two pages—is everything.
Kelton and many other MMT advocates’ priorities swing left, but the big ideas in The Deficit Myth aren’t inherently partisan. MMT could easily be adapted to rightwing ends. After all, as Kelton says, there is no economic rationale for taxing the rich, only a political one. National priorities can be recast as “deficits” that must be urgently addressed regardless of the cost in dollars, a project that Kelton applies most forcefully to climate change, but which in other hands could be used to justify building a border wall with Mexico or expanding the submarine fleet. That hasn’t happened yet, but some on the right, most notably Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio have begun citing MMT academics and integrating MMT ideas into their thinking.
Courtesy PublicAffairs
Kelton sometimes relies on sleight of hand to make her case. She rightly notes that the government is financially unconstrained when it comes to paying Medicare beneficiaries, for example, because it can’t run out of money. But that doesn’t tell us whether Medicare is sustainable as currently structured. Population aging, trends in obesity, and the persistent increase in the relative cost of healthcare all mean that Medicare will, on its current trajectory, end up eating more of the rest of society’s resources. Elsewhere, Kelton suggests the answer is to shift more and more of the workforce into medicine and elder care. But that’s quite different from saying that “the biggest challenges facing these programs have nothing to do with affordability.”
While Kelton’s main objective with The Deficit Myth is to explain what is possible and what people don’t need to worry about, she also has a specific policy proposal meant to solve a range of problems: the job guarantee. Every American who wants to would get paid $15 an hour, with full benefits, to do something “useful,” such as planting trees. That would be an improvement compared to a welfare system that pays people a bit less to do nothing at all, when times are both good and bad.
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The job guarantee is not, however, a solution to some of the challenges that Kelton highlights. It wouldn’t offset the loss of good manufacturing jobs (average wage: about $30 an hour, plus overtime) for example. It also wouldn’t do much to improve the bargaining power of low-paid workers in low-margin industries such as retail and restaurants. And given the likely composition of the hiring pool, the job guarantee probably wouldn’t help address the looming shortage of care workers Kelton warns about.
Kelton’s vision of permanent wartime-style mobilization to remake the economy in a leftwing image isn’t for everyone. But that’s beside the point. The Deficit Myth succeeds in exploding many common misconceptions that plague the public discourse about government spending, taxes, and borrowing. Those misconceptions are to blame for the enormous amount of money effectively left on the table every year through underinvestment, underemployment, and under-consumption. Now especially, we can’t afford for the government to be constrained by myths about money.
★★
take it away [Applause] good afternoon what's the matter what's the matter no one answered i know like good afternoon.
[Applause] this event is amazing don't go to sleep yet um i am just delighted to be part of what i think is going to be a really historic event. i want to say thank you again to the organizers kate billy and dave for the invitation to be here and also thank you to the various staff and all of the people who work so hard behind the scenes to put on events like these it is no small thing.
so thank you to all the people who we often forget about so um look i'm an economist i'm going to try not to be boring uh i i'm a yes we can kind of economist so i'm going to introduce you to a few uh who aren't like me.
but i want to try to get us to think like this little beaver because this little beaver has it all figured out okay this little guy has a problem he wants to solve the environment is inhospitable he needs shelter he needs a place to stay safe from threats he needs to be warm.
he needs to be secure so what does he do he says you know i gotta i gotta take care of myself so i gotta i gotta find the money to build a dam right so where does he go to the riverbank of course no he doesn't this little beaver is lucky and the reason.
he's lucky is because he doesn't have to worry about how to pay for it you see this little guy goes and he finds the resources he needs what does he need he needs treat you got to get a tree so you fell a tree and you take the parts of the tree.
and you construct what it is that you need a safe habitat right he is only concerned he doesn't need building permits there are no property rights to deal with he just needs the real resources to construct the dam to keep his family safe okay and so what i want us to do is try to think a little bit like the beaver for the next 12 or so minutes okay this i'm going to borrow some of this incredible artwork from the intercept aoc video and this is molly crabapple so i want to give her credit because i'm not just going to borrow from her i'm also going to play around a little bit with some of what she's done but look this idea you can't be what you can't see is really important the vision that has been laid out here by all of the previous speakers and by all of the people in the room today.
what we're trying to imagine is truly transformative right we're talking about things that touch every aspect virtually of our economy and not just here in the us but globally how do we make these kinds of investments these transformative changes in everything from not just energy but transportation agriculture housing the whole of it how do we do it in an inclusive and in a just way how do we bring everyone along and that's what the vision is and as they say in the video.
we don't have a lot of time to act so whether you say 10 years or whether you think the time span time horizon is a little bit longer we don't have a lot of time and we have to change just about everything and that includes the way we think about money and taxes and deficits and debt and you heard in previous conversations today that some of what seems impenetrable in terms of our politicians and working legislation through the process some of the hurdles that come up how are you going to pay for it where are you going to get the money how are you going to finance.
it how much do taxes have to go up whose taxes have to go up how much will it add to the deficit what will it do to the debt ratio and on and on i'm asking us for the moment to set those things aside think like the beaver okay because this is how they plan to beat us and we talked about this in the last panel the think tanks are out the ammunition is out the guns are out the lobbyists throughout the special interest groups are out they're gunning for this thing and they think that they know where the weak spots are okay.
they are going to play off of the public spheres and straight from the video aoc says we knew we needed to save the planet but people were scared they said it was too big it's too ambitious and the network of lobbyists and think tanks went to work doing their job so they haul out people like the former director of the congressional budget office to say 93 trillion dollars too big scary numbers right put the fear of god in people make everyone think that this is something.
we can't do it's out of reach the economists fall in line not all of them some of us are good but there are a lot of them who are going to fall in line and who are going to repeat these talking points and reinforce these ideas everyone from people at the most conservative think tanks to popular bloggers to former treasury secretaries they will say it's not a realistic calculus it would spend us into oblivion it's fiscally catastrophic and the public will be told this and the politicians will hear this and the resistance will build.
how are you going to pay for it the big elephant in the room that's designed to shut it all down so not only can we not be what we can't see but we can't have what we can't afford and we have to understand how to afford this how are we going to pay for it how should it work the republicans are clearly already using this talking point look the green new deal is what it's unaffordable it's unaffordable.
okay they're capitalizing on the public sphere of big numbers it's mega pneumophobia right it's a fear of very big numbers it's a real disease so they'll throw these numbers around and they'll say you know whether it's 16 trillion or 90 93 trillion by the time you put trillions in does it really matter.
you know you just start whipping up a frenzy people get very very afraid now i'm not going to talk a lot about this i could do and i i just finished teaching an entire phd course at the new school on modern monetary theory so believe me i can go on for a semester.
i'm not going to do that to you but i will tell you that there is an approach within macroeconomics that shows us how to put this content put this question in a different context and i'm going to give you just a little bit about what it is that i think we should do when we approach the pay for question and how we ought to be thinking because guess what we have been here before we've done this and we're talking about a new deal we're done with a green new deal we did this during the great depression that's when the new deal happened not at a time of great prosperity i might add right this was in the depths of the great depression and somehow someway we managed to introduce all of these programs and introduce the green new deal so not only did we do the green new deal.
but then right on the heels as the thing is is underway we do what we enter world war ii now we've got a massive transformation of the u.s economy in a way where we mobilized resources the likes of which had never been seen before okay so you have mass mobilization of an economy that is oriented around producing for consumer goods to one that immediately has to be transformed to producing for the war effort okay that like the green new deal touched every aspect of the us economy it was an enormous undertaking how did they do it well one of the things they did was they listened to john maynard keynes which generally a pretty good idea.
keynes wrote a little book called how to pay for the war and my position has been for a pretty long time now that we ought to use this as a blueprint to organize our thinking about how to go about approaching something on this similar scale with respect to the green new deal so what did kane say in this little book guess what it's called how to pay for the war and it has absolutely nothing to do with finding the money to pay for world war ii nothing to do with that so what is it about it's about how to roll out how to transform the economy and roll out the investments that are going to be needed in a way that is just he actually cared about that that the people who were going to have to make the greatest sacrifices in terms of the war effort would receive the greatest benefits.
on the back end when the war was over and to do it in a way that allowed the government to invest massively without creating inflation the whole entire book is about inflation mitigation inflation risk this is a little document the u.s treasury produced the united states was watching very closely.
it hadn't yet entered the war but they started circling circulating documents saying look we better pay attention to the way they're doing it because if we get involved we're going to have to figure out how to do this without creating an inflation problem so what happened the us government massively increases spending and there are a variety of controls in place smart offsets and various restrictions reforms incomes policies and a whole range of things but by god they managed to do it in a way that didn't let inflation spiral out of control and the reason is that they carefully thought thought through the necessary steps to integrate to to put this thing into place without creating inflation.
so how did they mitigate the inflation risk that's what was important so my position is that we ought to start with three questions forget the money piece for the moment ask what like the beaver right what are the resources we need that's what we need to do first you need to study carefully this problem what are we going to do how much are we going to spend in which ways are we going to transform industries occupations bringing people along what are the resources we need real resources what are the resources we currently have available.
and where do we get the rest how do we free up the rest and that's what the that's what the little book that keynes wrote was all about okay so depending on what your vision of the green new deal is how ambitious you need more or fewer real resources obviously there are lots of different proposals we've heard some talked about today where do you get the people well you have 15 to 20 million people let's say available to you today unemployed do you want to go into the part-time working but would like to work full-time.
there are lots and lots of people available you got factories operating well below full capacity take the low-hanging fruit that is the resources that are currently available to you and then recognizing that you're probably going to need more than the low-hanging fruit where can you get additional resources look medicare for all is an incredible opportunity with respect to the green new deal medicare for all transitions us away from a health care system that eats up 18 percent of our gdp to one that maybe takes 15 percent of our gdp.
look if you free up three percent of u.s gdp that's a lot of real resources if the private health insurance industry largely disappears that's a lot of resource capacity you have just freed up if you do something with respect to criminal justice reform we have presidential candidates talking about dealing with the fact that we've got two million people locked up how do we cut that number in half in four years if you have suddenly a million more people available to you that is real resources if you do something with defense that frees up real resources the finance industry that frees up real resources.
so there are a lot of ways to do this in terms of spending in terms of transitioning away to different programs in terms of variety of different problem policies that free up real resources and so i want to mention that the job guarantee has already been discussed the job guarantee is an incredible opportunity to deal with climate change and also create additional fiscal space create additional resources for the green new deal the point is if we were back in 2008.
god forbid right the wheels had just come off the economy you got 800 000 people a month losing their jobs the economy goes into a tail spin you have lots and lots of capacity in the economy to hire up people make investments spend into the economy and there's not a whole lot of inflation risk in an environment like that the closer you get to something that looks like full employment where resources become constrained the more important.
it is to begin to think about how to spend safely into the economy without creating the inflationary pressure this was keynes's point the benefit of starting in the great depression of course is that you have lots of resources available so we're starting from a different place so we have to first ask how much capacity is there in the economy to safely absorb any new investments we would like to make today without the offsets okay and this is where there is some really interesting work being done uh there are italian economists there are uh british economists people are starting to try to ask this question which is suppose the federal government wanted to spend i'll pick a number two trillion dollars that's the number that they're talking about with respect to infrastructure right trump pelosi schumer they all got together they said let's do two trillion dollars of infrastructure investment and they had a conversation everybody nodded and said that's a good number we all agree.
and then what happened how are you going to pay for it the democrats said we'll roll back your tax cuts trump said the hell you will and the whole conversation broke down and we get nothing so what i'm suggesting is look look at the new research there is research out there that suggests that right now in the u.s available to us today is at a minimum 500 billion in non-inflationary fiscal space available to us today in other words we could do two trillion dollars of infrastructure investment over the next four years without offsets do you think that increases the possibility of moving legislation democrats want it republicans want it if you could do it and you could make the case that the offsets aren't necessary the tax increases the pay force that usually hang up legislation in washington because we can do this in a way that is fiscally responsible in the sense that it doesn't create an inflation problem and possibly have a chance at passing that legislation versus saying the only way we get infrastructure is if we can fully offset it pay go raise taxes on someone then republicans won't vote for it.
and then we get nothing okay so my approach is to always at least start with the premise that it is possible the economy can handle a dollar of spending without requiring that you rip a dollar out right that's our approach is this pego idea that gets us in all kinds of trouble so very quickly i'm saying look for the fiscal space use what you have and then create what you need and in creating what you need that could be done through medicare for all that could be done through defense that could be done through criminal justice reform there are a variety of ways to do that ending fossil fuel subsidies you just start doing the math and very quickly you can arrive at something like a trillion and a half in available fiscal space this is how keynes approached it these are some of the lessons of the past that.
i think it would be useful to us to bring back into the conversation today and with that i'm just going to say let's not overthink it there's a straight the the shortest distance between two points unless you run a sphere is a straight line and we ought to take the direct route.
whenever we can and take advantage of any potential movement with legislation so thank you very much [Applause] hi everyone um i'm a millennial so my notes are on a screen um it's going to take just one second to set up um i just want to give a huge shout out to the folks who are working this event um.
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