ks.234
Half way to Infinity
What are my fantasy economics?Well you have your fantasy-economy so why can't I have Ruritania?
What are my fantasy economics?Well you have your fantasy-economy so why can't I have Ruritania?
One woman who has written a book about the Job Guarantee is Pavlina Tcherneva. Her website has a US-centric FAQ about it here. Q17-18 is about workfare. It might convince you better than it does me.The job guarantee seems like a good thing on the surface, but I wonder if there are devils is in the details[...]Also, and maybe this is mostly a US-based thing, I have trouble distinguishing between a “job guarantee” and “welfare with a work requirement”. The latter has been a GOP theme for many years.
Some of this would be policy choice - the government would try to move economic activity from lower-priority activity to our preferred activity (reducing global warming) by swapping spending on the former to the latter.MMT suggests that governments can keep spending so long as all real resources are not being used. 100% employment weans 100% resource utilization, so spending must then become inflationary. What happens then to spending to reduce global warming?
Governments can use the economy for good or ill. MMT doesn't change that.I see nothing to stop a newly elected hard right government from usurping MMT, turning away from the Green New Deal, and towards military spending, border walls, and other right wing pet projects on a scale we've never seen before.
People who advocate MMT seem to believe that government spending is for the public good. In particular, advocates on the left believe that very large amounts of government spending are needed to fight global warming and to fund guaranteed jobs,
They don’t need to. They seem to have no practical or ethical problem funding their own pet ideological projects, they just un-fund other stuff that they don’t care so much about, like policing, education and healthcare.So could the political right use the same MMT argument to provide money for things they value such as public floggings/hangings, mining the English channel or fitting flag-poles with pre-fitted Union flags to every residence?
One woman who has written a book about the Job Guarantee is Pavlina Tcherneva. Her website has a US-centric FAQ about it here. Q17-18 is about workfare. It might convince you better than it does me.
Some of this would be policy choice - the government would try to move economic activity from lower-priority activity to our preferred activity (reducing global warming) by swapping spending on the former to the latter.
Alternatively, in terms of fiscal space for additional government spending, you can try to create more, either by growing the real resources of the economy (by training workers, importing workers, etc) or by dampening some of the demand in the economy (raising taxes and thereby cancelling money is the obvious way, but there are probably other ways of achieving this, e.g. regulatory redesign).
Governments can use the economy for good or ill. MMT doesn't change that.
It's amazing the flexibility of thought that arrives at the mind of Rees-Mogg when his political goals require it. In this case, Truss is proposing to abolish the independence of the Bank of England. The way to expose the shaky foundations of BoE independence is to discuss QE.
The BoE governor, Andrew Bailey, has been worried about the impression that the bank was not acting as independent of government since at least June 2020, when following coronavirus it looked like QE was used a direct support for government spending. The fact that the BoE holds so much of the government 'debt' is a fatal flaw for the bank. Independent Central Bank, my eye. He has subsequently talked about 'unwinding' QE, but that ain't gonna happen. So, he may have shot his own goose.
Absolutely, government behaviour is determined at the ballot box. If we vote in a government that says it is going to cut spending on public services, we will get a government that cuts public services. At present there is a thought process that seems to say that spending on public services is not possible so people vote for cuts to public services.Governments can use the economy for good or ill. MMT doesn't change that.
Rather depends on what he said. If he said that government always has money because, as any fule kno it makes the damned stuff out of thin air, then he’s correct.Some bloke on one of those bad news channels (GB News) casually dropped that idea - fiat currency/we have the money etc - into the conversation the other day. Not sure what that says about MMT and GB News.