“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”
– John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Feb. 1936
Dear Reader,
We CAN have nice things. We have or can create the real resources – people, materials, land, space, time – needed to implement a host of programs to make life better for each and all, to make and maintain a great society. There is much that can and must be done.
- Implement a Green New Deal to de-carbonize the economy and address the climate crisis.
- Reconstruct, restore an improved CDCs to protect ourselves from the public health and economic effects of the COVID19 pandemic and other viral and bacterial threats to our well being.
- Institute a federally funded and locally administered Job Guarantee so that everyone who wants a useful and well-paying job can have one.
- Expand Medicare to increase health, eliminate health related debt and reduce administrative costs.
- Provide childcare for working parents.
- Provide tuition-free public college and excellent public primary and secondary schools.
- Develop modern infrastructure including high-speed rail from city to city.
Good people have devoted their lives to working through the details of these programs and more. We CAN have nice things that make all our lives better. Why?
- Because the US government is a Currency Issuer. Issuing its own currency means that the nation can’t “run out of money” or go bankrupt. “We the People” can — and should — allocate the resources, and then the funds we need, to the programs we as a society want. The answer to “how to pay for it” is always, we – through Congress – issue it.
- So long as there is production capacity, people and natural resources to apply, we can pay for things by issuing money via Congressional instruction to our Treasury.
- Our spending limit is inflation; we mustn’t exceed the time, materials and human resources available to produce what we fund.
Our national budget conversations should be about our spending priorities, not arbitrary spending limits. Yes, there are limits. But those limits are not the limits that come to mind from confusing the operations of a Currency Issuer with those of a Currency User.
Academics and economists describe how this works. They call their description “Modern Monetary Theory” (MMT), but their explanations and their findings represent a paradigm shift from the orthodoxy we have been taught. This site compiles links to research, proposals, explainers and commentary, text, graphics, video and audio files that bridge the gap between the complicated explanations and what the public needs to know. Once the paradigm shifts, the basics are straightforward and appeal greatly to common sense.
We rely upon experts who continue to build a body of knowledge and lead us through the decades-in-the-making thicket of misinformation and disinformation that can inhibit our understanding of how the money systems of sovereign governments actually work. And so we have a growing compilation of links to their writing and presentations for their colleagues, their students and for the general public.
Our aim is to amplify these voices so the ideas become more widespread; that more people will read and comment and that more sites — devoted to other issue areas — will begin to explore these ideas, connect the dots and feature posts from an MMT-literate perspective.
Basic explainers are here.
For a brief introduction and explanation of MMT, you might start with Congress can give every American a pony (if it breeds enough ponies), by Stephanie Kelton, in the LA Times, 9/29/2017. From her op-ed:
“What if it turned out that the government really could give everyone a pony — and a chicken and car? That is, so long as we could breed enough ponies and chickens and manufacture enough cars. The cars and the food have to come from somewhere; the money is conjured out of thin air, more or less.
Let me explain.
[. . .]
Whoa, cowboy! Are you telling me that the government can just make money appear out of nowhere, like magic? Absolutely. Congress has special powers: It’s the patent-holder on the U.S. dollar. No one else is legally allowed to create it. This means that Congress can always afford the pony because it can always create the money to pay for it.”