MrOllie, Avatar317, BBB23, and Knitsey vs MMT aka Modern Monetary Theory

[Archer]

Yea MrOllie is definitely doing WP:OWN

AND HE WILL FAIL. The article will end up a long, unreadable mess.

BBB23 was quick to try to discipline the professor and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez advisor, accusing him of transgressing MrOllie's edits

Inevitable. Someone who actually knows something about a contentious subject MUST be chased off and harassed.

If I could communicate any one thing to the public, it would be how the USA issues currency. It's probably the most important political issue of our time, by far and away. No other fraud comes close to being so exploitative or corrupting. None. I've even considered just printing out flyers, since I really don't get much feedback on the internet and it's difficult to get a message out.

[journo]

Avatar317's overall Wikipedia contribs show a lot of hyper-specific edit warring that is mostly unrelated to MMT and mostly about him getting angry about the way lefties in Congress approach policy and how Kamala Harris currently uses the term 'price gouging'.

[journo]

Avatar317's wiki activities specifically include:

A STRONG opinion that a poll showing a majority of Americans approve of a wealth tax be removed from the [[wealth tax]] article. A desire to include more rebuttals to a wealth tax proposal. Also a STRONG opinion that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren's 2020 wealth tax proposals not be mentioned in a relevant article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1212430016

A lot of interest about race and low-income housing.

Being weirdly determined to remove positive info about a left-wing consumer advocate group
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1219622444

Disciplining a hungry homeless person instead of going to his talk page and giving him a handy link where he could find info
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1242656903

An interest and likely positive opinion of microeconomic theories of inflation, while omitting who the dead nobel prize winning economist is, who he agrees with but only hints at.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1238847204

Advocating removing the criticism section from the [[capitalism]] article
https://archive.is/wip/wdLtG
as well as a specific interest in punishing RS issues when someone mentions a specific organization criticizing capitalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1243220223

The continual insistence that recent corporate price gouging is "legal", merely "price padding", and supposedly not to be conflated with "price gouging proper", (with a lot of capitalizations, emphasizing his conviction)
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... 1241546707

as well as various squabbles with self-identified AOC supporters in other pages lmao.

[journo]

It's interesting that almost every argument has an opposite side somewhere.

Few youngins know this, but the Democrats framed their entire presidential campaigns on "balancing budgets" for almost 2 decades after Perot's first single issue campaign. And I don't mean as an aside, but budget tightening was the number 1 thing Democratic presidential nominees would talk about in stump speeches and debates. Al Gore's number 1 campaign proposal in 2000 was budget tightening and broad tax cutting, mathematically necessitating an overall decrease in spending on social programs. Basic accounting.


https://web.archive.org/web/20000815054 ... com/issues

Almost all presidential debates throughout the 1990s-2000 were nominally obsessed with "paying off debt" and "reducing deficits". I've been watching presidential debates (based elementary school for doing that) and reading books about politics since I was 9 or 10 and I remember seeing all this and finding it somewhere between boring and with some bizarre original sin tinge to it, kind of like a religious sermon... debt bad, original sin, must atone.

Lately I've been seeing some of this type of Democratic policy of decades past rummaging around in the corners of social media. People who were probably steaming during the Sanders campaigns with MMT economist Kelton as the main economic advisor. This crowd strongly disliked the moderate leeway the Sanders crowd made in the Democratic Party with their anti-capitalist and wealth tax proposals. That anti side is looking for some way to erase the history of left-wing advances from 2016-2020, when the left-wing was particularly loud and getting their proposals and economists in important positions. Some even occupy journalist positions, there's no shortage of news articles seeking to blame everything on MMT or even Harris' very mild anti-price-gouging proposals.

They are also seeking a way to paint Harris as some sort of left-wing progressive, which is bizarre to me, her bipartisan housing bill defined 'affordable' as 400k USD.

I guess it'll be interesting to see what ideas float up to the top of a new group of Democrats. One thing is clear though, Trump 1 was our first MMT presidency.



I've had random people say that to me, including Republicans, it's pretty well established. Biden sort of the second, except he tried to negotiate with Saudi cartels like a neoliberal, arguably destroying his legacy by assuming they are competitive free market actors, allowing them to create inflation.

And now Trump 2 is the third MMT presidency. And I don't see Trump doing any significant fiscal budget tightening thank god. He ran much larger fiscal deficits than Biden, just in a different way initially, with large tax cuts coupled with large spending, which he will do again.

[ericbarbour]

You're not wrong, but this is getting wayyyy off topic.

[Archer]

You're not wrong, but this is getting wayyyy off topic.

Journo is quite wrong. Inflation is a consequence of monetary policy - currency issuance, in particular. Since the early 1900s, the US government delegates this privilege to central banks (which are private organizations) and commercial banks, to the detriment of the public. They create money when they make loans and the money is destroyed if/when it is paid back. Commercial banks practice fractional reserve banking and have very low (if any) reserve requirements, so they are the de-facto source of USD. The economy needs money to operate but since money is created as debt, it must borrow more and more or default. Ergo, we live in an era of abusive and unchecked usury. Anyone who talks about debt, monetary policy and so forth without acknowledging this fact is either uninformed or straight bullshitting you.

[journo]

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Actually, broad tax cuts can coincide with a large degree of "balancing a budget" without cutting social program spending. At least it can now, because the amount of interest paid to treasury security holders is so large.

Eliminating or reducing these interest rate payments is the most humane option to achieve DOGE's desire to cut "3 trillion in spending". It would even be beneficial if that is all that is cut.

As far as entirely balancing the budget though, as mentioned in another thread, I don't know what the point of that is. In most cases it would involve throwing millions of poor onto the street. Although it could also take the form of enormous amounts of taxation of the wealthy. The rich funding spending programs dollar by dollar is probably politically impossible. The rich funding emergency spending might even be logistically impossible, hence why "balanced budget" countries lose wars to those without such constraints. But would be interesting to hear someone advocate that at some point. I've just never heard it before.
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[Archer]

As far as entirely balancing the budget though, as mentioned in another thread, I don't know what the point of that is.

So that the government and the public does not depend upon private or foreign credit to function, among other reasons. Otherwise the concept of public, independent government is undermined. Surely you can see that this question answers itself. Yet as I explained just above, the root of the problem is monetary policy and not budgetary policy. The budget cannot be fixed without monetary reform.

In most cases it would involve throwing millions of poor onto the street. Although it could also take the form of enormous amounts of taxation of the wealthy.

This assertion is wrong. Friedman advanced a plan in which neither of these need happen.

Perhaps in my previous reply I should have used the word misinformed instead of uninformed. It seems fair to say that most of the public have been misinformed by the media's discourse, in which debt is presumed a consequence of the budget and discussed only within that presumption. That national debt is corrosive to democracy and independence can be concluded a-priori, however.

[journo]

In most cases [balanced budgets] would involve throwing millions of poor onto the street. Although it could also take the form of enormous amounts of taxation of the wealthy.

This assertion is wrong. Friedman advanced a plan in which neither of these need happen.

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As far as I know, Milton Friedman did not advocate balanced budgets or surpluses as any kind of rule. And certainly not to the degree of his followers. The people who've advocated balanced budgets since the Great Recession want continuous, MANDATED balanced budgets or surpluses, to be applied every single year

Milton Friedman would be considered a "left wing radical" or whatever on his budget positions by his followers. He embodied more of the internet meme verion of Keynesianism. Milton very explicitly advocated for federal budget deficits during recessions, surpluses during economic booms, and balanced budgets only during full employment, which we are rarely at.

source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1810624

However, as I'm sure you're well aware, Friedman had extremist ideas about *how* to go about cutting budgets. As Elon Musk is keen to point out, Milton Friedman proposed eviscerating most federal government agencies, with a particular interest in eliminating all public housing and housing vouchers adminstered by HUD. There are 2.2 million Americans in public housing and about 8-9 million in HUD housing or HUD vouchers. Eliminating or privatizing HUD would leave millions of people with little to no income to fail to meet market rates and become homeless. Even if the government gave them their HUD housing free of charge before eliminating the program, that wouldn't account for the additional people who need to go on the programs every year.

However, HUD housing isn't the only thing that would be on the chopping block, it's just the easiest way to show the damage balanced budgets can do. As mentioned, cutting interest payments can take a big dent out of spending, and might be good, but it won't be enough for the continuous sort of balanced budgets that Perot-fans have been advocating and which Milton Friedman never advocated.
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[Archer]

As far as I know, Milton Friedman did not advocate balanced budgets or surpluses as any kind of rule. And certainly not to the degree of his followers. The people who've advocated balanced budgets since the Great Recession want continuous, MANDATED balanced budgets or surpluses, to be applied every single year

Milton Friedman would be considered a "left wing radical" or whatever on his budget positions by his followers. He embodied more of the internet meme verion of Keynesianism. Milton very explicitly advocated for federal budget deficits during recessions, surpluses during economic booms, and balanced budgets only during full employment, which we are rarely at.

Irrelevant. I don't care about how you characterize and pigeonhole Friedman (or anyone else) into this superficial mythos of -ists and -isms. If one reads between the lines one can pick out quite a good course of action from Friedman's work. Namely, raising reserve requirements to 100% and paying off the debt with public money issued by the treasury. You seem to avoid the point of monetary policy and its causative role vis-a-vis national debt and deficit. Do you acknowledge what I wrote here (viewtopic.php?p=30451#p30451) ?

See page 812 (24 in the pdf) of this paper https://web.archive.org/web/20201223091 ... armack.pdf

Another citation: "Milton Friedman, a keen advocate of the Chicago Plan, argued that it would allow the government to control inflation simply by setting the growth of the money supply at a fixed percentage each year. The idea had another surprising benefit. During the transition, banks would be required to swap their holdings of government bonds for state-backed money. This new money would pay no interest. As a result, Fisher said, “the interest-bearing government debt would be substantially reduced.”" https://web.archive.org/web/20230608213 ... 023-04-28/

Friedman did not author the original Chicago plan but was an advocate of it. At any rate, the political opinions of all these authors are mostly beside the point.