Here's 40 cents worth of answer.
Posted on 02/11/2022 8:46:37 PM PST by SeekAndFind
On Feb 1, the New York Times ran an article warning that the national debt had topped $30 trillion for the first time, leaving us in so much debt that “the government would need to spend an amount larger than America’s entire annual economy in order to pay it off."
That’s a problem.
Five days later, the same paper ran a puff piece touting Modern Monetary Theory and its claim that you can just print as much money as you want to fund an infinite welfare state.
The “economic theory” embraced by Bernie Sanders, AOC, and Starbucks hipsters everywhere “posits that if a government controls its own currency and needs money…it can just print it.”
No wonder Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, whose economics degree from Boston U has appreciated worse than anything at Walmart, insisted that MMT needs to be “a larger part of our conversation.” It needs to be because MMT’s cult-like denial of reality is how we got here.
House and Senate Democrats, along with the Biden administration, which is packed with Sanders and Warren apparatchiks, have tested the theory that money can just be printed. Now once interest hikes on the national debt kick in, we’re headed for $1.4 trillion in interest.
So we’ll just print more money.
The New York Times claims not to understand why this might be a problem. Or as Stephanie Kelton, the leading proponent of MMT, put it in the Times puff piece, “Want to build a road? No problem, so long as you have asphalt and construction workers. Want to feed children free lunches? Also not a problem, so long as you have the food and the cafeteria workers.”
The workers will probably want to be paid. And what do you pay them with when money is worthless? It’s a problem tackled by progressive regimes from Weimar Germany to Venezuela.
"Biden Can Go Bigger and Not ‘Pay for It’ the Old Way," Kelton insisted in a New York Times op-ed last year. Biden went bigger and we’re all paying for it in the oldest way possible.
Kelton, who had worked as the chief economist for the Democrat Senate Budget Committee and then for Bernie Sanders, became part of the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force. And Biden, who has spent a lifetime in politics and whose closest brush with economics came when Hunter was allegedly reserving 10% of kickbacks for him, doesn’t get it.
Neither, on every odd day, does the New York Times.
But to put it in terms that the Times can understand, the paper’s business people decided to raise its digital subscription price for the first time in 2020. The paper just bought Wordle for a "seven-figure sum" because 44% of its digital subscriptions are coming from its cooking, reviews, games, and other non-news areas. Despite the Times’ enthusiasm for socialism and even Communism, it remains listed on the stock exchange and when it needs more capital, it doesn’t just print more stock certificates, it raises prices and tries to provide value.
Crazy, huh?
Kelton, who was the economic adviser to the Bernie Sanders campaign, joined Stony Brook University, a public university, with an apparent salary of $208,590. Up from $200,000 in 2017. In a striking case of income inequality, her salary is "163.8 percent higher than the average pay for co-workers and 216.3 percent higher than the national average for government employees."
At Stony Brook, Stephanie outearns her husband, a fellow professor, who only makes $175,000.
And then there's her MarketWatch podcast, speaking fees and book, The Deficit Myth, published by the Hachette Book Group which also published In Defense of Looting.
All of this enables the Keltons to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle with an estimated $2 million waterfront estate on nearly two acres. Aside from the usual looting of the taxpayers, this arrangement is made possible by a functioning economy in which money from public universities and publishers can be exchanged for the niceties of life.
But whether it’s health care, crime, homes, family values, or economics, lefties want to live a more traditional life in which they have their choice of doctors, their children from two-parent families attend private schools and crackheads aren’t pounding on their windows at 2 A.M.
And also they’d like to be able to get paid in actual money instead of colorful confetti.
Yet here’s the New York Times, with a market cap of $7 billion, featuring a woman who lives in a waterfront estate, insisting that, as Kelton put it, “Q: Are you saying the government can just ‘print the money’ to pay for new spending? A: Is there any other way?”
A currency based on something other than funding lefty policy agencies would be a start.
The United States is borrowing trillions to fund interest payments on a debt amassed to fund a war on poverty and assorted “investments in our future” as Obama liked to call his sprees. We mortgaged our future in an experiment with leftist social policies that have crashed and burned.
Now the leftist proponents of those policies insist that we shouldn’t be bound by mere numbers.
If the New York Times or the Keltons ran their own books the way they would like to see us run ours, the woke would shortly be very broke. And in prison. The Social Security Trust Fund, sold to a generation that survived the Depression and witnessed the early stages of the disintegration of the family as a hedge against growing old in poverty, became just another flow of tax revenues that can’t and won’t be paid back once the unfunded bill fully comes due.
The doomsday clock for the Trust Fund moved up one year. The news that Old-Age and Survivors Insurance will now run out in 12 years was largely ignored in 2021. It'll go on being ignored until the mandatory 20% cuts start kicking in. And then it’ll get even worse.
Medicaid's hospital insurance will be out much sooner by 2026. That's only four years away.
Modern Monetary Theory shrugs at such things. A Truthout article on MMT and Medicare declares, “Congress can simply authorize the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to spend the money necessary for single-payer health care.” Money to lefties, who often come from privileged backgrounds, is a Nietzschean expression of progressive will, not a real thing.
In the real world, that means a Venezulean nightmare in which a prosperous oil-rich country became a place where hospitals had no medicine, stores had no food, and money had no value because the sociologist running its economy announced that inflation did not actually exist.
The vast distance between the elites and the real world makes such illusions possible.
America is vast and wonderful enough that its academic elites and economic podcasts can exist in an entirely different realm than the one occupied by people just scraping by. Socialism is the hobbyhorse of university grads who propose things that Karl Marx would have laughed at. Inflation may have killed the dollar store, but it’s still an illusion to the Biden White House.
In the face of the grim consequences of their social policies and economics, leftists are climbing higher into a fantastic world in which the prosaic limitations of human nature don’t apply. Like adults watching Marvel movies, it’s not really a world they believe in, but that they’d like to. It’s a world without any of the limitations on the political superhero fantasies of their egos. They expect us to live in that world, but don’t ask them to leave their mansions and join us there.
You could ask Zimbabwe or Venezuela that same question.
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“in the Times puff piece, “Want to build a road? No problem, so long as you have asphalt and construction workers. Want to feed children free lunches? Also not a problem, so long as you have the food and the cafeteria workers.”
Good God, I remember this exact concept from a book in the 80s by Viktor Suvorov called “Inside the Soviet Army”.
He was explaining how in a communist country, military activity was far less expensive. He said if you need to move a tank division, in America you have to pay for the fuel, and the railroad freight fees etc. But in a communist country the state owns the oil industry, the rail system, etc. So the government calls the rail system and says “transport the tank division to East Germany”, and it costs nothing!
And now, this communist insanity is mainstream in America and the New York Times and congressfools are pushing it.
The economy - the real one - cannot be destroyed.
It just needs new money, and hanging quite a few bankers.
“in the Times puff piece, “Want to build a road? No problem, so long as you have asphalt and construction workers. Want to feed children free lunches? Also not a problem, so long as you have the food and the cafeteria workers.”
And they never seem to wonder where asphalt and food magically come from, and why someone would leave home for no salary and build a road, or work over a hot oven all day for free.
Idiot communists.
still scratchin my head...
“Five days later, the same paper ran a puff piece touting Modern Monetary Theory and its claim that you can just print as much money as you want to fund an infinite welfare state.”
isn’t that what we’ve been doing for a long time ?
“isn’t that what we’ve been doing for a long time ?”
Correct. We should be hearing more about MMT because without us paying attention it went from the Bernie Sanders crowd to also being embraced by both Bush and Trump.
It’s a grand economic experiment that we are all part of without our consent.
(So we’ll just print more money.)
Basically, also stated by Alan Greenspan.
What was that 1965 hit song by The Knickerbockers?
This is also possible because of the lack of education on economics, and the lack of education on the Constitution, freedom, history, and everything else.
Here's 40 cents worth of answer.
Both sides are responsible for the massive debt. They both spend to buy votes and common sense be damned.
Get rid of 90% of useless government institutions would go a long way to fix this.
Zimbabwe was once the breadbasket of Africa. Venezuela was once the richest country in South America.
China well tank the dollar and then it is all over…they do not let me print all the money I want
I don't know; what was it?
Don't keep us all in suspense...
the LEFT is why we cannot have nice things
According to my “monetary theory” any group or individual is free to offer IOUs printed on chicken turds and redeemable in UOIs existing only in cyberspace and known as FARTCOIN. They don’t have the right to try to force me to believe in their silly monetary religion though.
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