I’m not well educated. I have been repelled and disenfranchised by a lot of societal norms and spent a lot of time in my own head trying to reconcile that in my life. But some concepts just seem to make perfect sense to me. It is always validating when someone much smarter and more educated than I am says the things I have been feeling and supports the conclusions and concepts I arrive at. I guess if one is going to conclusion shop you could do worse than David Suzuki as a purchase.
I think there are two issues here and I’ll talk about them using examples.
I’m 100% open borders. It’s not that I don’t appreciate looser immigration restrictions and less draconian treatment of people crossing the border, but I’m not going to stop asking for open borders, treating all humans well, and loving freedom. If I had the power, I would implement this overnight.
I think something like a 70% top tax rate would be good. I think very high taxes on wealth would be fair and good for all. I think M4A would be viable and not bankrupt the government. I don’t know these things though and if I were actually in power I would not implement them overnight. I would ease into them and re-evaluate as I went along. That still doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s strategically best for me to lobby for the max - even beyond what I might implement.
On the whole it is pretty clear that it saves money if you account for the premiums that people save. But, the revenue has to be addressed as well. I don’t think it’s far-fetched a clusterfuck could be avoided if the system were expanded over time as opposed to all at once. And I don’t think this is controversial. None of the plans, not Bernie’s, involved changing everything overnight.
The more I read about MMT I’m less convinced the government going bankrupt is a real thing for countries like US, UK and Canada that control their own currency.
I’m sympathetic to MMT. I just think these things are complicated to the point of chaotic and in general an approach of small changes, observation, and continuous fine tuning is prudent.
I agree completely. All I’m saying is something like expanding Medicare access by 5 year age groups at a time might actually be superior. Changing things for 200 million people at one time can easily have unforseen effects that could really fuck things up.
Sure, but what better time to practice a spot of MMT than when borrowing rates are at an all time low?
If you make sure to include pension commitments for the new government NHS employees (the NHS is the biggest employer in England) in your calculations it should be ok.
There’s a strong case imo for a big bang implementation to give people more time for it to sink in that actually they’re better off financially.
When you look at the comments that progressive PMs and Presidents make on leaving office they’re generally of the type “I wish we’d been much bolder much sooner”.
This column is vacuous babble. The author purports to have something urgent to say, but when you actually dig in, it’s just a wrapper for a bunch of cliches:
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the world hard, but it’s also showing we can and must change our ways quickly if we want live well on this small blue planet.
It’s no longer good enough to wring our hands and fret about the multiple crises we face. We must become informed, speak out, vote, hold our politicians to account, join forces. We must demonstrate the power of compassion and love…
We have to recognize that we are interconnected with each other, with nature, even with the rocks and waters that form our home.
We all vaguely, generally know what the author wants to abandon incrementalism to accomplish, because we know what the type of people who speak this particular dialect of vacuous nonsense usually favor, but you truly have to guess to figure out what the author is actually advocating for. It’s very reminiscent of Orwell’s Politics and the English Language:
Each of these [examples of bad writing] has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
The MMT stuff is mostly just bs propaganda. It’s trivially true that no government (whether or not they are a currency issuer) can “go bankrupt”–bankruptcy is a legal concept that has no concrete meaning applied to a sovereign nation. It’s also trivially true that a government can’t be forced to default on debt instruments that are denominated in currency that the government issues–the government always has the option to print currency to fulfill its obligations.
None of those trivial facts do anything to address the concern that people actually have when they speak loosely about the government having an “unsustainable” debt burden or worry about it “going broke.” The concern is that if the government has a large debt burden, it would be forced to cut back on spending, raise taxes, or engage in hyperinflationary currency issuance to meet its debt service obligations. (Or perhaps that it would choose to default on the debt and then have to do one of those three things to meet current demands for cash.) Every MMT advocate will, in a squirrely way, admit that the government ultimately does have to make those trade-offs.
Like I’m a five year old please. Does it just mean spend more and monetize the difference? Does it mean something else? Is it just Keynesianism with some sanding and polishing? Why is it even called MMT rather than MFT? I really wish to understand.
You figured it out. Every morning I wake up terrified that people will someday recognize that we are interconnected with the rocks and waters that form our home. It would ruin me, as a person who either benefits from today’s systems or whose economic conditions are worsening! That’s why I’m out there peddling the big lie of radical centrism every day: we are interconnected with the forests and the fields, yes, but never with the rocks and the waters.
Since JT doesn’t count as American, I’ll answer on our behalf. A lot of us do. I did. You definitely see him if you watch a lot of nature docs - or environmentalist stuff.
Probably two of the best economists to check out regarding MMT are Steve Keen and Stephanie Kelton.
Another economist who’s worldview and politics would fit well ITF, but is critical of MMT is Mark Blyth. I don’t know if he’s written much about MMT though.
Mining in particular is Canada’s big issue and not just in Canada, but Canadian companies are all over terrible mines all over the world, especially in Central America.
I get that something in your post and Suzuki’s article has pissed bob off, but I’m sure he’s willing to let go of his focus on the line about interconnection with rocks.