Funniest content on all Lemmygrad
I’d never heard of Jared Bernstein. It seems he’s been Biden’s economic advisor for over a decade.
The interviewer is Stephanie Kelton, and her film, Finding the Money, was released to the US & Canada today. I see that it’s available for sale & rent on Apple TV. Hopefully it will get released on Kanopy soon, because some public libraries allow free access that way.
This is hilarious.
Side point but isn't there a good Marxist analysis / criticism of MMT somewhere?
There was a struggle session on Hexbear when Roderic Day dunked on the Deprogram co-host JT for a pro-MMT video, which got the latter's subscribers very upset. I remember there being some decent ML-oriented takes there against MMT.
The problem with MMT as I've seen it articulated is that it's the modern equivalent of 19th century takes like "This is how you can make the British Empire work to help you!". It's the contemporary "FDR New Deal" faustian bargain meant to co-opt the Western left and even the PatSoc chauvinists towards pursuing not any economic alternatives like socialism but an ever more perfect capitalism. I'd actually recommend that JT video for a model representation of how MMT sells itself to the Western left. It's "rational" and "logical." All upswing and couched in enough Keynesian economic jargon that the only comprehensible issue with it to the general viewer seems to be just that "the greedy Western political leadership simply don't want to share the pie," thus blocking its enactment.
What goes unsaid is that the entire substructure which MMT rests upon is that of American dollar hegemony. The policies of MMT can only function in a jurisdiction where the imposition of such autarkic currency sovereignty can effectively ignore counter-threats of credit ratings downgrade, sanctions, divestment, IMF and World Bank condemnation and all consequential fallout with impunity. The only jurisdiction capable of that, perhaps even in the entire West, is the US alone, through the half century of work it's done in solidifying its financial hegemony.
When non-imperial core (or wannabe imperial core) countries try to enact it, like Greece under Varoufakis era of the early 2010s, it was condemned by the ECB and the rest of the EU Troika. Greece succumbed to those political pressures, reversed its tracks and instead embarked on typical IMF-proscribed austerity SAPs. The standard of living has subsequently never recovered with current GDP per capita only approaching early 2000s levels.
As such, not only is MMT agnostic of its own basis on the bedrocks of American financial imperialism but it further advocates for the preservation of the current status quo of dollar hegemony through its proposal to trickle down some dividends of that system to the (exclusively American) working class. Therefore, its aim seems to be reeling in those of the tendency in the Western left that drifts towards the "socialism is the best way for gains to be distributed for me personally" in-it-for-myself sentiment rather than those of the anti-imperialist or socio-political bend of Western leftists.
Jfc.
The government doesn't borrow money; it sells bonds, probably, and uses what people lend it to print money, which it can print anyway, I think. Why are you trying to make this more complicated than it needs to be? No I can't explain it, why do you ask and what makes you think that a senior economic advisor would understand nevermind explain how all this works?
I have tended to give credit to the ruling class and it's advisors. I've been too kind. I know why that cartoon dog in the housefire thinks everything is fine—it's enjoying watching these ghouls fail absolutely to comprehend the contradictions of capitalism.
I might invest in AI now I've seen this. The more the US trains it's AI on western thought and the sooner it relies on the AI for serious jobs, the faster the whole thing will collapse.
Gold
