|
quote:Or, given how hard it is politically to raise taxes, what happens when the program leads to inflation, but there's no political ability to raise taxes? So even though what MMT describes is correct, the critics say still best to act like we need to "pay for" programs in a sense. But of course MMT analysts have answers for those critiques. This is what worries me about leaning too hard into a "print more money" approach. I have no idea whether MMT is legitimate on the merits, but it seems eminently possible that a country could end up in a scenario where the inflationary effects of printing money were under-accounted for and the only way out is a politically unpalatable tax increase. (Such a situation would almost certainly lead to printing more money, on the assumption that that's more palatable politically, and risks hyperinflation.) I haven't had time to dig through all the links, but is there currently an empirically established method for predicting which sorts of spending would not increase inflation? It seems like without such a method a much less risky approach would be to just tax the gently caress out of the rich.
|
#
¿
Jan 24, 2019 09:03
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 07:16 |
|
|
PerniciousKnid posted:It's worth remembering that you can also fight inflation with monetary policy, i.e. the Fed. Wait, so I'm confused about something. What would the point of the Fed be under MMT? I'm not an economist but I'm pretty sure that the fed influences monetary policy through buying and selling debt (i.e. treasuries). In a MMT-based system, why would the government issue debt at all? Isn't the central point of MMT that you don't need to "pay for" federal problems by issuing debt or raising taxes?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 25, 2019 00:06
|
|
|
LuciferMorningstar posted:What's the limit? Are we close to it? How much room do we have? You assume implementing some selection of policy goals plus payment on debts would necessarily overrun the limit. Further, if inflation is becoming a problem because of the money flowing out of the government, the government could always do some combination of increase taxes or decrease spending. Mechanically speaking, I'm not seeing an issue. I think the problem I politically speaking it is always advantageous to kick the can down the road instead of imposing austerity (in the form of higher taxes or lower spending). Not that this doesn't happen already, but I don't think it's a massive leap to think that under an enthusiastic MMT policy regime that the temptation to just print money and let someone else worry about it in a few years would be nearly impossible to resist for politicians who, as all politicians tend to do, care only about winning the next election. This is sort of what I was getting at a page ago. Even if MMT is theoretically sound, that doesn't ergo make it a good guide to policy, since in the real world you have to account for, well, real people and their motivations.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2019 03:13
|
|
|
twodot posted:Again, I understand that you personally don't understand macroeconomics, but your idea that macroeconomic policy should be simple enough for you to understand is just dumb. Further caring about money supply is a thing we already need to do and actually do, we just have this bonus concept of "what if we pretended like the government had a literal checking account", which is wrong, unnecessary, and damaging. In a democracy, it's probably a good thing if we adopt a macroeconomic policy that isn't incomprehensible to the average voter? "Tax people in order to pay for programs" is pretty comprehensible.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2019 00:38
|
|
|
Owlofcreamcheese posted:The issue isn't that it is some system beyond the limits of the human mind or something. The point is that the whole thing seems to be an effort to obfuscate things by declaring everything free then demanding everyone pay taxes to pay for it but with a weird fanciful claim that you are "Deleting" the money that spending totally different money instead. With the answer to any "well how much taxes would need to be deleted to pay for X program" being some sort of weird "heh, of course I can't tell you that, you just gotta trust me" Yeah I think this is a better way of phrasing my problem. I don't think that the issue is, exactly, that we should choose our monetary theory based solely on how easy it is to understand. Rather, my concern is that, in the absence of an empirically well-established method, MMT seems to mandate that we place some blind faith in...someone... who has an oracular power to predict the inflationary effects of a given policy. Even if MMT is in some academic sense a more accurate description of how money works in our fiat currency system, it makes the relationship between spending, inflation, and taxation too complex and abstract for a reasonably informed citizen to make an informed choice. I guess I should qualify that I don't think any aspect of economics is an exact science in the way that physics is, and even if it were, I don't believe in a strong principle of explanatory exclusion. It's possible, IMO, for two theories to be true enough for all practical purposes. If we have two theories that are good enough, and one allows for informed decision making by citizens, whereas the other makes that basically impossible, we should prefer the former for practical reasons. Dead Reckoning posted:So is there any way to know in advance exactly what either of those numbers would actually be? This. I'd really like someone to respond to my post on the first page where I ask if there is an empirically established method for predicting the effects of inflation. Cuz if that doesn't exist then... I don't see any advantage whatsoever to a MMT based analysis.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 30, 2019 03:14
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 15, 2024 07:16 |
|
|
Chitin posted:Just caught up on the thread and lolling at the ~1/3rd of posters who think this is a system we would switch to and not simply a more accurate way of describing and predicting the system we already have, as was clear from the OP. There are two sorts of claims floating around in this thread, both by people who support and oppose MMT: 1) MMT is just a more accurate analysis of what we already do. 2) MMT is a panacea that will allow us to implement social programs without worrying about the cost. I might be able to buy 1), but for the reasons Dead Reckoning and a few other posters have noted, 1) doesn't imply 2) and seems inconsistent with it. If it's just a new way of analyzing something and doesn't involve substantive policy changes at all then whether or not we should prefer it is an entirely academic question.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2019 23:55
|
|