Blog-Reference
Stephanie Kelton again jumps the ship. The day before yesterday she promised a pony for every American, yesterday she promised to care for the unemployed, poor, vulnerable, elderly, and debt-laden students, today she vigorously promotes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.
Stephanie Kelton and the MMTers have good news for everybody: “Anything that is technically feasible is financially affordable. And it won’t be a drag on the economy ― unlike the climate crisis itself, which will cause tens of billions of dollars worth of damage to American homes, communities and infrastructure each year. A Green New Deal will actually help the economy by stimulating productivity, job growth and consumer spending, as government spending has often done.”
How does MMT solve any social/economic problem? By deficit-spending/money-creation.#1 Does this work? Yes, as long as the government can increase public debt. At present, nobody can say where the limit is. MMTers claim that there is none.
As a matter of principle, all these social/environmental programs can be realized either with a balanced budget or with deficit-spending/money-creation. This is known to governments and economists since time immemorial. However, the MMTers' unique selling proposition is that the one and the only right way is deficit-spending/money-creation.
This, of course, is NOT true. The point is that deficit-spending/money-creation does NOT help WeThePeople as a whole in real terms but only the Oligarchy.#2, #3 MMTers are NOT the real Friends-of-the-People. Just the opposite, they try to hijack genuine grassroots movements.#4
Basically, the political agenda of MMT is pushing public deficits. The economic rationale lies in the macroeconomic Profit Law which implies Public Deficit = Private Profit. From the macroeconomic standpoint, it does NOT MATTER AT ALL whether the deficit is caused by war spending, social spending, or environmental spending. From a marketing standpoint, though, it matters a lot. Military deficit spending does NOT go down so well with the general public but social/environmental spending does. A green label helps to camouflage the distributional effects.
With the sudden rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s new environmental populism and the eclipse of Bernie Sander’s old social populism, agile MMTers like Stephanie Kelton have to jump ship and sell Wall Street’s deficit-spending agenda in the updated bluff package of a Green New Deal (GND).#5
Egmont Kakarot-Handtke
#1 How MMT makes everybody happy
#2 MMT, money creation, stealth taxation, and redistribution
#3 MMT is ALWAYS a bad deal for the 99-percenters
#4 MMT and grassroots movements
#5 Stephanie Kelton’s legendary Plain-Sight-Ink-Trick
Related 'MMT’s virtue-signaling distracts from failure/fraud' and 'MMT is NOT bold policy but spineless fraud' and 'MMT Progressives: stupid or corrupt or both?' and 'Fraud comes always in the cloak of philanthropy, salvation, or threat of doom' and 'MMT Progressives: The knife in the back of WeThePeople' and 'Meet the MMT smart arses' and 'Q: How are you going to pay for it? MMT: By stealth taxation!' and 'No MMT illusions! YOU are going to pay for it'. For the full-spectrum refutation of MMT see cross-references MMT.
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Twitter Nov 19, 2018, "Kelton Stephanie, Pavlina and Alexandria the Great"
Twitter Feb 1, 2021, Nice things
Twitter Apr 25
Twitter Aug 20 Nice things again
Twitter Sep 15 The nice MMT folks "solve" ALL problems of WeThePeople with deficit-spending/money-creation and as it so happens (because of the macroeconomic Profit Law) the rich always get richer
Twitter Apr 6, 2023 Any green agenda that does not feature as a top priority the reduction of the military in order to reduce damage to the environment can not be taken seriously. At the same time, the reduction of the military budget provides the money for investing in ecological measures. For "green" deficit spending holds the macroeconomic Profit Law, which implies PublicDeficit=PrivateProfit.
Twitter/X Nov 6, 2023
