The MMT Debate With Dean Baker & Randall Wray

1. Excellent, does that include Math? Sorry but the IRA does almost nothing to reduce GHG emissions and $389 Billion will do nothing to change a $25 Trillion economy based on 80% Fossil Fuel Consumption. The numbers just don't add up. It is about 1.5% of what would be necessary, so really almost nothing. Especially when that $389 Billion is spread out over 10 Years (so 0.15% of what would be necessary) and the War Budget is $886 Billion every year, the Military is the largest institutional emitter of GHGs on Earth, so those are some weird numbers too . The correlation between global energy production and global GDP is overwhelmingly strong. A simple linear regression between energy production and GDP has a correlation coefficient of 0.997. You cannot run a $25 Trillion economy based on 80% Fossil Fuel use and expect 0.15% of GDP investment per year into Climate Stability to accomplish anything. Weirdest number of all? That the Biden administration somehow thinks these provisions will produce a 50% decrease in GHG emissions by 203O, that is comical in its stupidity.

2. Is it the way to fund the Green New Deal? No, MMT is not a theory, it is the way we fund everything through the Federal Government, it is just a detailed description from the accounting filter instead of theoretical economics lens.

3. Deans argument did not age well. We spent trillions and our weak inflation only came from the Russia war and corporate greed

4. The very idea that there are unemployed resources being Idle Capital that needs to ne brought into use to improve the GDP is just too simplistic to be taken seriously.
   The reason it is that it ignores the various reasons that resources are idle which includes that their lack of relative efficiency in the market on cost/ benefit basis has already been determined by the economics of their situation. Examples are out of date machinery that is superseded by newer machinery and natural resources for which a newer product has made uncompetitive on price basis or quality basis. The reality is government does not know what is uncompetitive or less efficient or an out of date process because government is not in the business and in the game of knowing.
   So it makes the idea a very doubtful idea that includes politics and most probably will fail for those reasons alone at a huge cost to the economy.
   Keynes warnings and policy of having a high deficit budget after WW2 to accommodate the changes in employment after returning from war jobs overseas and at home failed miserably after the budget was cut and the predicted bad results did not materialize.

5. How long the solar panels and their batteries last ?????I heard it was about 10 years . Then how do we recycle them ?????

6. Funny how other countries much smaller than the US can afford free college or affordable college, guaranteed public healthcare and other various forms of welfare, but we can't in the US with supposedly more resources than anyone else. Now that doesn't pass the smell test.

7. I don't know if I fully understand MMT but I do know this. Our crooked Congress spends something like 2T a year on the military machine which goes around destroying other countries for fun and profit, and writing blank checks to Wall Street and passing billionaire tax cuts. If it can afford to do that I think it can afford to spend whatever is necessary to create a thriving new green economy and implement many anti-poverty measures amongst the general population.

   When Congress pays out the ass for these bullshit reasons they never say anything about inflation. Sounds like inflation accusations are a convenient excuse not to help the people and lo and behold, it sure as fuck is.

   Fuck inflation. It really doesn't matter and government spending does not cause it for the most part. Those are the rich scumbags who don't want average people to get a better deal who keeps saying that shit or brainwashed idiots like this interviewer who just accept old myths without questioning them. Well I say the emperor has no clothes! fuck that, fuck inflation, fuck all that.

8. Wray: This is what MMT is.
   Baker: I agree with all of it.
   Great debate.

9. Randal needs a chance to respond to that last point by Dean. But otherwise, great discussion. Thanks TRNN!

10. Dean Baker, in 1942 we (my parent's generation) did do these things virtually over night. 1940 GDP was $103 B  monetary base (mb)= $43 B. 1941-1945 WWII cost $300 B = ~300% GDP / 4 years. By1945 GDP was $228 B mb= $260 B. For ~300% of GDP over 4 years we > doubled GDP, build the 20th century American industrial base, and won WWII. Today: 2018 GPD $22 T mb= $22 T. GND cost $16 T / 10 yrs = $1.6T per yr or ± 6.5% of GDP for the next 10 years to build a new 21st century American energy and physical infrastructure, and a modernized industrial base. But instead of 50% of GDP per year to save our asses, the GND will require only about 6.5%. Cheap at many times the price!

11. Why is printing money to bomb iraq, afghanistan, libya, vietnam, syria, grenada, potentially iran, venezuela ok? But printing money for health care, roads bridges, college, social security such a big deal? We are supposed to trust politicians to do the right thing with the printing press? They have been printing money like mad since at least 1971 and now student loan debt can never be repaid. Homes cost 10 times average income. People work two three jobs? I am not sure what the answer is but i will take individual freedom and market based money over government monopoly and money for nothing.

12. How does the government go about spending this money? Gives it to firms that are building solar energy? Starts its own company? If the government were to print money to build something shouldn’t the people own shares somehow in the project. It isn’t fair for the government to say print money and give it to certain private companies who get the profits over other companies and the profits don’t go back to the people

13. Nice

14. MMT and Randall Wray misleads people about the real cost of expanding the money supply by deficit spending and claims that taxation does Not fund government spending.

    He can't even address the issue of his outrageous claims that taxes are destroyed and not re spent to fund government spending which he cannot reconcile with the factual realities of the history of taxation revenues that are shown in government records namely the Whitehouse records of budgets, taxation and spending.

    Another absurd claims of MMT is that the national debt is an Asset for the private sector that does not have to be paid back when the reality is that it has to be paid for and is daily through taxation when the debt matures and that maturity of past bonds (the debt) takes place every day plus along with that debt the interest has to be paid. Some of those debts (about 30%) are owed to overseas persons and foreign governments so the balance of payments is adversely affected by the payments.

    A totally absurd claim that is part of the heavily faulted MMT theory.

    Reference the Whitehouse records at :- https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/historical-tables/ table 1.1 which shows taxes form most of government spending. If they didn't the National debt would have risen in the past ten years to well over 40 trillion not the 21 trillion it is today.

15. No more arguments for privatizing (because the government cannot afford this or that). The system is called CAPITALISM there is a reason for that. For the first time since money, banking, interest, etc. was invented the concept of money would clearly work for the regular people. It would be a massive loss of power. Currentyl politicians and the meida people speaking for Big Finance tell us that we need to court "Capital", or the danger that the "investors" will leave the country.

    Well capital (in that case MONEY) is easy to come by – even if they evade taxation. The commoners can be compensated for higher inflation, and companies INVESTING are not hit by inflation either. But the fortunes sitting on accounts or being invested in bonds !

    Bond – government debt is a popular investment vehicle (they clutch their pearls over debt – and then they happily invest into bonds, and get tha money back after a few years plus interest. The interest payments are of course missed (in the current system) for public spending.

    The U.S. government could pay down debt and reduce the interest payments. The investors would not get any more bonds. The money would sit on accounts – likely with negative interest rates (for regular people higher wages and / or direct benefit payments could solve the problem).

    And public housing could be WELL funded – thus creating energy efficient, nice, well planned safe environments. Which again messes with the investment of wealthy and rich people.

    In countries like Austria they built well planned housing in the 1920s and 1930s. They are still in use (overhauled of course, central heating, electricity, new roofs, windows). It is not a shame on the contrary it will mean you are the envy of your acquaintants if you tell them you got one of those. people like to stay in there, parks and public transportation.

    Since low – medium income people live there and hope to stay there, they are committed to their apartments (they often do some improvement even if they do not get paid for it), they are committed to the house and the community – there is a soical mix not a ghetto and the residents would not put up with crime in the neighbourhood. Not in the nice houses and with white collars living in as well (think teachers, office workers, civil servants ….)

    Rent is lower then in the market for the profiteers, the adjustments are according to inflation and not more, and if you pay the rent and do not start fights with neighbours you can stay for life. (And if you are behind with rent it is still better to be on the mercy of the admin running the house – it is run often by the city or a coop – as opposed to a for-profit landlord. You might get a generous payment plan especially when there are children involved).

16. MMT is a communist BS with one simple idea "We have free money and we can spend them".
    So the one confident consequence will be the decreasing value of dollar. Decreasing faster than in last decade. That is pretty much all you need to know about MMT. But unfortunately, except that there is an ocean of planned economy BS around it added.

17. L. Randall Wray needs to work on Bernie's campaign!

18. I don't know why there would be any worry about full employment and inflation. There are millions of people in South America that would love to work and live here.

19. Why does Real News consistently invite Dean Baker after he's been sniffing glue all day.

20. MMT is primarily a descriptive economic theory.

    That is, it simply describes what is.
    Accepting MMT is accepting reality.
    #MMT

21. By "resources" they mean "people." 🙁 And by the way, you can't use fiat money for war or UBI or welfare. You can use it to build infrastructure assets and to trade it for products and services, but not to destroy infrastructure or to pay people to be idle. Too many MMT advocates want to keep fractional reserve banking and its unsecured debt practices. 🙁 Too many MMT advocates want to keep using material resources as the same increasing pace rather than slowing down.

22. What are your speculations on the employment situation of the average worker post-automation and in a renewable energy economy?

23. People are missing that the monetary system we have is a weapon of power in the elite's arsenal and they know how to use it. Yes, it is irresponsible to allow private individuals and institutions to have that much power which is why that power must be transferred to the public and used responsibly for public purpose. The banks power to create money must end or they will make monetary war by creating hyperinflation, they have done this many times, most famously in Germany which because they own the media and have kept people ignorant, they were able to blame it on the government. MMT, Muddying Monetary Truth.

24. Personally the only way to save the world is throw the blood of the bankers

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