Funny, because MMT reads like "flat earth Facebook group" to plenty of mainstream economists.
The part that is controversial is normative, starting with the call to honesty (“since spending of a nation in its own fiat is not, in fact, limited by the ‘fiscal’ constraint of revenue + borrowing but only by monetary constraints, we should stop treating fiscal ‘constraints’ as real and instead analyze what has traditionally been described with the misleading metaphor of the fisc through a monetary lens”), and proceeding to concrete policy recommendations which are derived from actually following the call to honesty.
It would only be begging the question if we were assuming MMT correctly describes how currency works, but that’s a provable from officially published sources; a fact rather than an assumption.
For example I think this is one of the best debates and even though plenty of Austrian economics fans have seen it, they think Murphy “wins”. What do you think?
Also most of my work has been on verifying MMT in an Australian context, this is one of the best videos I produced about the reality of Australian federal finances: an interview with an investment manager:
Stephanie Kelton and Warren Mosler have been producing massive volumes of similar stuff for the US.
MMT economists regularly “win” debates based on facts, but the real game is winning hearts and minds and that takes longer.
So you agree with my parent comment? My reference to Weimar Germany and late-2000s Zimbabwe was intended to point out the broadly-acknowledged normative implications of the descriptive content that's shared by MMT and the FTPL.
Even if that were the case (and its not; in the metaphor of the fisc, there is a hard advance limit—money must come into the fisc by tax or borrowing to be spent, wasn’t hasn’t come in cannot be spent—whereas monetary constraints are more of the “you can do it, but there will be consequences” type), the key thing is that the (real) monetary constraints are different than the (illusory, stemming from a bad metaphor) fiscal ones.
Not so. A government that's able to borrow can issue debt and roll it over indefinitely under some conditions (viz. so long as economic growth is higher than the return being paid on that debt). It amounts to the exact same thing.
> Not so. A government that's able to borrow can issue debt and roll it over indefinitely under some conditions
The hard limit is “the amount of debt borrowers are willing to purchase” (plus current revenue plus reserves.) In MMT “spending” is equivalent to money creation and “borrowing”, like “revenue” is money destruction (but, in the case of borrowing, with a promise to create more and use it in a particular way in the future.) And there is no necessary quantitative tie between creation and destruction; a fiscal imbalance need not be bridged by borrowing (requiring a borrower) or additional revenues or additional reserves.