Irrespective of its economic merits, any policy which depends on a competent and upright Congress does not inspire confidence. It feels like it's bound to be one of those "True MMT Hasn't Ever Been Tried (TM)" things.
MMT is an understanding of factual nature of the environment in which government operates. Reduced to one sentence it is “the entire concept of fiscal balance is play-acting as if the government was using commodity or externally-controlled fiat currency, rather than it's own fiat and a distraction from the real constraints on government finance, rather than something which reflects, or even loosely guides policy makers towards, the real constraints.”
That might be true in the academic sense.
But in reality, the only people who talk about MMT are people who just want to spend money infinitely and claim that there is no negative consequences to doing so.
Which of course, doesn't make any sense if you know anything about MMT in the academic sense, which absolutely admits that there is negative consequences to spending/money printing.
Mainstream economists don't really think MMT has much to say, TBH, and few professionals care about it.
It turns out that the real world is complicated, and thats why we have experts in the world.
Thats the important part here. Whatever your opinion is on any of this, basically all the actual people who know what they are talking about, disagree and think that MMT is basically valueless.
All other theories feel like yeah... but how does it explain this phenomenon or that
MMT is an old lie, oft repeated, and only discovered as a lie after it is far too late.
No, it's not.
> What proves MMT is in any way ‘factual’.
Factual is class of statements, opposed to normative statements.
> MMT is an old lie
It can't be that old, since it only describes the constraints on sovereign finance of entities functioning in their own pure-fiat currencies, which isn't a subject that has been of interest for very long.
They're asking for supporting evidence for MMT.
dragonwriter seems to have meant "factual" in the sense of "concerned with questions of fact", "is" rather than "ought", and was not intending to claim (at least in that statement) that the answers MMT provides are correct.
gray-area seems to have interpreted "factual" as "accurate" or "truthful", and was objecting that defining a theory as "concerned with things which are actually fr-reals true" is cheating.
To be fair to gray-area, "true" is probably much more common a use of "factual". On the other hand, the broader context was that dragonwriter raised the point in objecting to argument about what MMT purportedly says we "should" do.
Factual is entirely off base as a descriptor and has been picked here in an attempt to make it seem grounded in reality and without challenge.
My point here is not to defend MMT but the quality of the conversation.
If someone comes along and says Modern Moo-netary Theory says we should to build too many catapults, and another someone points out that the theory doesn't address questions of "should", pointing out that the theory talks about spherical cows in space doesn't rescue the original objection.
That a theory makes unrealistic assumptions is absolutely an appropriate objection to raise, but it belongs upthread. Otherwise it won't be seen by people who've already decided what they think of the narrower topic of this subthread, and we'll get more repetition of worse arguments.
My objection is to people talking past each other rather than engaging (whether intentionally or unintentionally) and remains as relevant as ever.
The old lie is that sovereign entities (note the deep and old roots of that term in feudal societies) can debase their currencies with zero consequences.
Usually this works well for a long time, until all of a sudden it doesn't.
Congress: 535 ants on a leaf, floating down a river towards a waterfall, with each ant thinking they’re steering.
I share your lack of confidence.
I’ve got my popcorn already.