This might be acceptable if there was even one single thing about YouTube that was itself democratic in any way.
Since there isn’t, this is inherently an inherently anti-democratic maneuver. The corporate oligarchy is shedding yet a bit mote hesitation to fully realize itself. This is not a good thing.
This is extremely disingenuous. The reason we aren’t having kids is we can’t afford it. All of my friends want to have kids but can’t. The few who have done so anyways are hurting.
It’s really strange how it is that we cannot afford having kids, but our parents and their parents etc, who almost universally have been poorer than us, managed to do that.
It is hard to tell if you are supportive or resigned to the eventuality. Just in case it is supportive...
MMT relies heavily on the fact that tracing back who is paying for it is so convoluted that its backers can claim nobody is. That isn't true. At any moment there is a fixed pool of real resources that we have to divide up. It is pretty obvious that a lot of those resources should be given to people who will use them to create more real resources in the future. It is also obvious that everybody needs enough of a share to live.
A State entity can control the money supply and do strange things with the accounting identities, but in real terms it can only redistribute wealth. The government isn't going to turn to MMT to increase the claim of the makers and innovators to societies bounty; the truly inspired ones tend to be a bit eccentric and tend not to present very well on camera at a press conference. MMT will be a redistribution, by and large, to fast talking and charismatic charlatans or pork barrelling to political consituenties. The political process is not very good at assessing technical risk but excellent at pork barrelling. People will use the word 'fairness' a lot.
It is reasonable to say that MMT will do wonders for the accounting identities. GDP through the roof, measured real wages may rise, everyone can be a millionaire, banks will be saved and inflation will be mysteriously low no doubt. The median citizen will also have less actual stuff and a lower real quality of life.
But MMT it's not a policy, but a model, a description of how the system really already works.
For example, many people here is predicting hyperinflation, using the MMT model we can predict that's not going to happen. Many people here are predicting "slave grandsons by public debt", the MMT model tell us that doesn't make sense.
>>"MMT relies heavily on the fact that tracing back who is paying for it is so convoluted that its backers can claim nobody is"
I don't know what that means.
>>"At any moment there is a fixed pool of real resources that we have to divide up"
>> "MMT relies heavily on the fact that tracing back who is paying for it is so convoluted that its backers can claim nobody is"
> I don't know what that means.
Lets jump over the the Wiki page on MMT where it has a helpful comparison to Keynesian economics [0]. First line in that table:
Keynesian: Advocates taxation and issuing bonds (debt) as preferred methods for funding government spending.
MMT: Emphasizes that taxation and debt issuance are not required to fund spending.
Under the Keynesian model I can tell who is paying for government activity - taxpayers and lenders. I can also work out how much, by comparing how much tax they pay or how much they lend. It is reasonably transparent about who the government is distributing resources away from (net taxpayers, current lenders) and towards (net tax receivers, people who are enjoying the latter stages of a bond where the interest is payed back). People could have claimed resources; then they were taxed/saved so they didn't.
How do I do that under the MMT model where neither of those things are necessary? Who is the government distributing resources away from? How do I figure that out? I know where they are going. Where do they come from? When we debate MMT inspired ideas, how will we figure out who will be worse off in real terms and in what proportion?
People aren't interested in MMT because it is a neat model; but because if we use that model then it becomes very hard to explain that policies are wasteful uses of time and stuff. It is very easy to make a taxpayer understand why government waste is bad. Quite hard to make people take an interest when nobody knows if they are net givers or takers.
Well, first, I suspect that Keynes would be ashamed of what post-keynesians have made of his insights.
Anyway, you are implying that the current system is Keynesian, and that there are people advocating to change to a MMT system. But the current system is already MMT.
So, to answer your question, for accountability, you could just keep in place the current way of doing things (or find some alternative) but recognize that "taxation and debt issuance are not required to fund spending". Let's recognize that public debt is irrelevant for instance, and that, yes, deficits can be inflationary, if the economy is already in full utilization but could not be in the proper circumstances.
>>" People aren't interested in MMT because it is a neat model; but because if we use that model then it becomes very hard to explain that policies are wasteful uses of time and stuff. It is very easy to make a taxpayer understand why government waste is bad. Quite hard to make people take an interest when nobody knows if they are net givers or takers"
So, basically, what you are saying is "let's lie to people" so we can have a smaller government.
They say that naming is one of the hard things of computer science, maybe it's also true for economics. Let's change the name "public debt" for "public investment" and discuss then how much public investment can we afford.
>>" People aren't interested in MMT because it is a neat model; but because if we use that model then it becomes very hard to explain that policies are wasteful uses of time and stuff. It is very easy to make a taxpayer understand why government waste is bad. Quite hard to make people take an interest when nobody knows if they are net givers or takers"
> So, basically, what you are saying is "let's lie to people" so we can have a smaller government.
That is not at all what roenxi is saying. That is what roenxi is saying MMT is saying, except for the "smaller government" part.
It also is you putting (incorrect) words in someone else's mouth, which is very much not cool.
It is also coming somewhat close to a personal attack (since many of us consider lying to be immoral), which is against site guidelines.
It was not my intention to attack anybody but, what roenxi is saying is that, people interested in MMT (like me), is not interested in understanding how the system work, but in lying to people. So, yes, very much not cool.
I hope so, but I suspect that the people that is predicting now hyperinflation and the enslavement of our children, will keep doing so despise all absence of evidence.
Unfortunately, economics is a very ideologically charged subject.
The harsh modern monetary reality where most Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck and have zero job security or savings is enslavement in all but linguistic accuracy.
This has been going on since started inflating our money supply (since when we went off the gold standard in 1971 at least), and the economic degeneration won't stop unless we stop the inflation of our money supply too.
Ironically, the mid-century war on unions began with the state and the company owners acknowledging this very thing and proceeding to implement friendly unions. The result was working people gradually began distrusting their unions more and more, which brought us back to the drawing board.
>The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.
Funny you say that because it seems to be no problem when it comes to bailing out corporate investors. Of course, near-zero federal interest rates didn’t make “economic sense” either, but yet here we are.
The term "bail out" is usually understood to mean replacing funds after the owner of them lost them through bad decision making. What's happening here isn't a conventional bailout. Governments have destroyed the businesses of private investors deliberately and explicitly - reductions in the damage aren't bail outs.
The virus would have shut them down anyway if they had stayed open and their employees and customers became ill. The bad decision making here is the lack of foresight to keep cash on hand to weather a storm like this, despite making record profits in the billions. We are all told if we don’t keep 6 months of cash on hand we are financially negligent. Large companies were begging for money within two weeks of shutdowns happening, after spending so much of their cash on stock buybacks to pump up stock prices.
Bay area issued the first national stay at home order on March 13. By then demand had already dropped precipitously. If your restaurant is seeing 60% fewer bookings, are you going to keep as many wait staff? Are you going to order as much food? How is that going to impact your supplier? And their supplier?
On the flip side we have places like Smithfield food that stayed open and their workforce became infected. Smithfield alone has as many infected as the entire country of Sweden reported newly infected yesterday. These are problems of different orders of magnitutde. How does a factory stay open with 500 people infected at once?
Given how many people have mild symptoms and how age-dependent it is, it's entirely plausible that 500 infections would yield only a handful of employees to sick to work.
And yet Sweden still disproves your point. Businesses have stayed open, including restaurants and other such businesses, and yet Swedish companies are not evaporating due to their workforces being too sick to work. That's not even close to happening, is it?
Again, Sweden is not the US, they have not been hit nearly as hard. More people will die today in the US than have died total in all of Sweden. Sweden is not immune from the effects of Covid. They have imposed measures to limit the size of gatherings, have closed secondary schools and colleges, and have imposed restrictions on restaurants. Despite their looser restrictions they are still expecting to see the economy contract and have experienced record unemployment:
```
A record 36,800 people were handed their notice in March, more than 10 times the number from the same month last year.
The government has offered loans and guarantees and expects to increase expenditure by around 84 billion Swedish crowns ($8.35 billion) this year.
At the same time, the central bank has poured money into the financial system, offering 500 billion Swedish crowns in loans to companies via banks and boosting its purchases of securities by 300 billion crowns.
Some people think the richest country in the history of the world could figure something like this out, but those people don’t seem to understand how it became the richest country to begin with. The United States was built on laissez faire exploitation and that is not going to change overnight.
This is right, except the “predator nations” are really a ”predator class”. Working American have gotten a very raw deal. We have lost industry and jobs and wages galore to globalist projects. We may be the consenters of imperialism, but we are not the beneficiaries.
Since there isn’t, this is inherently an inherently anti-democratic maneuver. The corporate oligarchy is shedding yet a bit mote hesitation to fully realize itself. This is not a good thing.