These blogs provide debriefs to those who a beguiled by the false logic paraded as economic theory by mainstream (neo-liberal) economists

A 78 per cent tax on fossil fuel companies in Australia is not required to fund a Just Transition away from carbon

As I noted yesterday, last evening I accepted an invitation to speak on a panel at a – Rising Tide – event, which is part of the massive – People’s Blockade – of the port of Newcastle that is running from November 19-24, 2024. The Blockade is a threat to the mining corporations and the NSW State Government has introduced pernicious regulative structures in the last week to make it illegal to venture in into the shipping channel to block the coal ships. Heavy fines and an aggressive police force are waiting for any activist who tries. It is an extraordinary overreach by government, who are clearly siding with these corporations. The discussion last night was interesting if only to confirm that this important group of activists have been channelled by poor advice into adopting mainstream macroeconomic frames, which make it very hard for it to broaden its appeal to the rest of the population. Here is my advice to them which will allow them to break out of that straitjacket and become an important educative vehicle for the climate movement.

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Some debriefing on continuous fiscal deficits and debt issuance

A government cannot run continuous fiscal deficits! Yes it can. How? You need to understand what a deficit is and how it arises to answer that. But isn’t a fiscal surplus the norm that governments should aspire to? Why frame the question that way? Why not inquire into and understand that it is all about context? What do you mean, context? The situation is obvious, if it runs deficits it has to fund itself with debt, and that becomes dangerous, doesn’t it? It doesn’t ‘fund’ itself with debt and to think that means you don’t understand elemental characteristics of the currency that the governments issues as a monopoly. These claims about continuous deficits and debt financing are made regularly at various levels in society – at the family dinner table, during elections, in the media, and almost everywhere else where we discuss governments. Perhaps they are not articulated with finesse but they are constantly being rehearsed and the responses I provided above to them are mostly not understood and that means policy choices are distorted and often the worst policy decisions are taken. So, while I have written extensively about these matters in the past, I think it is time for a refresh – and the motivation was a conversation I had yesterday about another conversation that I don’t care to disclose. But it told me that there is still a lot of work to be done to even get MMT onto the starting line.

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MMT and international trade – some further considerations in a degrowth context

One of the undercurrents at the recent UK MMT Conference in Leeds was the apparent unwillingness of MMT economists to acknowledge their mistake in dealing with international trade. In our new book – Modern Monetary Theory: Bill and Warren’s Excellent Adventure (published July 2024) – we devote a chapter to this issue. There are various strands to the criticisms we receive ranging from claims we are simply wrong at the most elemental level to others claiming trade has no part in the MMT framework. All miss the point and I am surprised people have tried to make a ‘career’ (or advance their egos) on this issue. As I have noted several times in the past, the issue is nuanced but the elementary facts are not. I am now working on a section for my new book (with Dr Louisa Connors) on ‘degrowth’ and system viability from an MMT perspective and so I am linking the trade aspects of MMT with this narrative to provide further clarification of how nuanced this area of discussion can be. Here is a little glimpse of that work.

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From the archives – my early statements on the need for degrowth and the resistance they received from progressives

As part of a another current project, which I will have more to say about soon, I was trawling through early Internet archives of the Post Keynesian Thought (PKT) listserv archives and was reminded that I began my degrowth journey many years ago. Going back in time and coming across things that one has written is an interesting experience. In this case, I reflected on my changing narrative style, my naivety in places, and the continuity of my thinking over the course of my academic career. The following discussion is the product of my archival research for another project of the Post Keynesian Thought (PKT) discussion list archives. It has been an interesting exercise and brought back interactions, personalities and the like that I have forgotten about. Many on that list have since died (sadly). But what is established is that 30 or more years ago there was widespread resistance still within the progressive economics community to the idea that the destruction of the planet would require major systemic change. This resistance bears on the debates now between the dominant ‘green growth’ group who think capitalism aided by global financial capital can achieve the changes necessary to meet the climate challenge and the degrowth camp who want fundamental system and behavioural change. My writings in 1995 placed me firmly in the latter cohort.

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The tax extreme wealth to increase funds for government spending narrative just reinforces neoliberal framing

Despite the rabble on the Right of politics that marches around driven by conspiracies about government chips in the water supply or Covid vaccines and all the rest of the rot that lot carry on with, the reality is that the well-funded Right that is entrenched in the deepest echelons of capital are extremely well organised and strategic, which is why the dominant ideology reflects their preferences. That group appears to be able to maintain a united front which solidifies their effectiveness. By way of contrast, the Left is poorly funded, but more importantly, divided and on important matters appears incapable of breaking free from the fictions and framing that the Right have introduced to further their own agenda. So, the Left is often pursuing causes that appear to be ‘progressive’ and which warm their hearts, but which in reality are just reinforcing the framing that advance the interests of the Right. We saw that again this week with the emergence of the Tax Extreme Wealth movement and with the release of their open letter to the G20 Heads of State – G20 Leaders must tax extreme wealth. This is the work of a group which includes the so-called Patriotic Millionaires, Oxfam, Millionaires for Humanity, Earth4All and the Institute for Policy Studies. It demonstrates perfectly how these progressive movements advance dialogue and framing which actually end up undermining their own ambitions.

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A large government presence required for energy transition does not mean massive deficits are required

There appears to be confusion among those interested in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as to what the implications for a green transition that will fasttrack the transition to renewable energy will require by way of government. I regularly see statements that government deficits will have to be ‘massive’ for extended periods because the private (for profit) market entities will not move fast enough to deal with the climate emergency in any effective way. The confusion inherent in these claims is that they fail to separate the ‘size’ of government from any particular ‘net spending’ (deficit) recorded by government. The two outcomes are quite separable and have to be if government action is to achieve sustainable outcomes, not only in terms of environmental goals but also price stability goals. So let’s work all that out. Failing to do so, leads MMT activists to make claims that open them up to criticism from those who understand the point I am making but have different ideological agendas. So they make erroneous claims such that ‘MMT just advocates big deficits’, or that ‘MMT thinks that deficits do not matter’. But they have been lured into that position, in part, by the social media behaviour of some MMT activists.

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A nation does not shift to an MMT regime

Earlier this week (April 25, 2023), I saw a Twitter exchange that demonstrated to me two things: (a) some mainstream media commentators are now understanding some of the principles of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and relating that knowledge to practical matters that concern them (lens being applied to values); and (b) high profile financial market players still command a platform in the media but have little understanding of what MMT is and consistently issue false statements. A lot of misinformation continues to be circulated about our work. Cursory inferences, usually based on an extrapolation of what the flawed mainstream theories say about policy interventions, are then conflated with assertions about MMT. In other words, MMT is interpreted through the terminology and conceptual structure of a rival paradigm. We reject such inferences and comparisons.

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When mainstream economists arrive at ideas 50 or so years late and pretend to be contributing to knowledge

I regularly encounter mainstream economists who are confounded by the dissonance that the body of theory they have been working in introduces and then seem to think they have come up with new ideas that restores their credibility. The more extreme version of this tendency is called plagiarism in academic circles. But the less extreme version is to produce some work in which you conveniently ignore the main contributors in history but hold out implicitly that the ideas are somehow your own. As mainstream economics fumbles through this period where the fictional world they operate in and push onto students is increasingly being revealed as a fraud, several economists are trying to distance themselves from the train wreck by resorting to restating ideas that in a period past they would have criticised a ‘pop science’. This syndrome is an accompaniment to the well established ‘we knew it all along’ or ‘there is nothing new here’ defenses that are often used when new ideas make the mainstream uncomfortable. I saw this again in a recent article from the British-based Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) which discusses the way modern banks work – How monetary policy affects bank lending and financial stability: A ‘credit creation theory of banking’ explanation (March 20, 2023). The problem is that heterodox economists knew this from years ago including with the seminal work in the early 1970s of Canadian economist – Basil Moore. The other problem is that the CEPR authors choose not to credit the seminal authors in the reference list, which I think is poor form.

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German Bundestag body’s MMT overview exposes the hidden agenda – the population simply can’t be allowed to understand MMT

The Scientific Advisory Department of the Deutscher Bundestag recently (January 27, 2023) released a discussion paper – Modern Monetary Theory – An overview – which really exposes what all the opposition to our work is about. Initially, I was interested to learn from the discussion paper that I was a US economist after thinking all these years that I was Australian by birth and citizenship. Perhaps that error tells you something about the quality and depth of the research effort that the authors undertook. The paper recognises that Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is “an economic school of thought that has existed for around 25 years” but is hazy on the provenance, ignoring that at the beginning there was Warren Mosler, Randy Wray and myself. Rather interestingly, the discussion paper claims that there is no disagreement among the mainstream as to the theoretical and conceptual elements of MMT. So the mainstream all agree with us now! That is quite an admission. But, as one gets further into the discussion, it becomes obvious that the authors miss the point when they start talking about MMT policies. What their critique of MMT illustrates is that the real antagonism to our ideas is that they might open up wider policy options to the public than the political process cares to admit. Or, in other words, the real problem is that an understanding of MMT exposes the TINA mantra – that allows governments to maintain policies that advance the interests of the few at the expense of the many – as wanton neglect of the responsibilities of government. That exposure, if sustained, would alter the whole policy terrain and challenge the hegemony of the elites. That is what the opposition to MMT is about.

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