“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
Taxes For Revenue Are Obsolete
— Beardsley Ruml, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. 1946 By Warren Mosler, 2011, Huffington Post
The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. The process by which banks create money is so simple the mind is repelled.
— John Kenneth Galbraith, ‘Money: Whence it came, where it went‘ (1975)
“..As a minimum the bottoms to incomes need to be compatible with sustaining self esteem and the tops need to be such that a few cannot undermine democracy by using the power their wealth brings them to subvert the political process.”
— H.P. Minsky, 1995
“…there is nothing to prevent the Federal Government from creating as much money as it wants and paying it to somebody. The question is, how do you set up a system which assures that the real assets are created which those benefits are employed to purchase? So it is not a question of security. It is a question of the structure of a financial system which assures that the real resources are created for retirement as distinct from the cash. The cash itself is nice to have, but it has got to be in the context of the real resources being created at the time those benefits are paid and so that you can purchase real resources with the benefits, which of course are cash.”
— Alan Greenspan Committee on the Budget, House of Representatives, March 2, 2005
“It’s not tax money. We simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account …” Ben Bernanke, 2010, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank on 60 Minutes
“We are talking about the monetary case for a job guarantee … to be able to democratize money we have to democratize work… there is an inherent relationship between the two in the modern monetary system… the monetary system’s original sin is that it creates unemployment and that money is a public institution that is launched into existence by creating unemployment… Taxes are never really a financing operation for the government. There are always a resource transfer operation even throughout historical time. They exist to provision the government in real good and services they are a tool of redistribution…”
Money as a Democratic Medium | The Monetary Case for a Job Guarantee
— Pavlina Tcherneva (@PTcherneva), Jan 10, 2019
“… the United States is a currency issuer. Currency issuers are completely different than currency users. This is a really big deal. Cities, businesses and households like yours and mine are all currency users. Our federal government is not. Currency issuers are unique; they should not behave like currency users. If you can grasp that, you’re already further along than most of our politicians.”
– Geoff Coventry, Modern Money Basics Video, It’s the People’s Money, June 1, 2017
“Government debt is better thought of as money. Government debt never has to be paid back. Government debt is not a burden on future generations, even when held by foreign investors.”
– Steven Hail, Government debt versus household debt: ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ debt explained, Independent Australia, May 2017
“Let’s be clear.
Austerity is inappropriate fiscal policy.
Austerity is irresponsible.
Austerity is ideologically-driven horseshit.
The purpose of austerity has nothing to do with getting a sovereign currency-issuing government’s finances ‘back on track’ so that it can ‘live within its means’. A sovereign currency-issuing government such as the US, UK and Australian governments face absolutely no hard financial constraint upon their ability to spend. They spend their currencies into existence at will. They alone are the only source of their respective currencies. Taxation is not revenue for these governments. None of these governments can ever go ‘broke’ involuntarily.
The purpose of austerity is to deliberately shift government spending away from the public purpose with the intent to deliver up that which belongs to the people as a whole into the hands of the few.
Austerity is grand larceny.
Austerity is a deliberate act of violence committed by politicians on the citizens which they supposedly represent.
Austerity is murder.”
— Ellis Winningham, Facebook,July 3, 2017
“Having a lot of government debt can be good or bad, but the problem is never that the government runs out of dollars. We print dollars.”
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) January 2, 2018
“Whoa, cowboy! Are you telling me that the government can just make money appear out of nowhere, like magic?”
– Stephanie Kelton, Congress can give every American a pony (if it breeds enough ponies), LA Times op-ed, Sept. 29, 2017
“Anything that is technologically feasible is financially affordable for the sovereign issuer of the currency. It comes down to technology, resources, and political will. We’ve got the technology to take care of our own. We’ve got the resources to take care of our own. All that is missing is the political will.”
– L. Randall Wray, An Alternative Meme for Money, Part 5: A Spending Meme, New Economic Perspectives, Dec. 10, 2012
“What is true of government as a whole is also true of particular programs. Social Security and Medicare are government programs; they cannot go bankrupt, and they cannot fail to meet their obligations unless Congress decides–say on the recommendation of the Simpson-Bowles Commission–to cut the benefits they provide. The exercise of linking future benefits and projected payroll tax revenues is an accounting farce, done for political reasons. That farce was started by FDR as a way of protecting Social Security from cuts. But it has become a way of creating needless anxiety about these programs and of precluding sensible reforms, like expanding Medicare to those 55 and older, or even to the whole population.”
— James K. Galbraith In Defense of Deficits March 4, 2010
“As the sole manufacturer of dollars, whose debt is denominated in dollars, the U.S. government can never become insolvent, i.e., unable to pay its bill. In this sense, the government is not dependent on credit markets to remain operational. Moreover, there will always be a market for U.S. government debt at home because the U.S. government has the only means of creating risk-free dollar denominated assets.”
— Brett W. Fawley, Luciana Juvenal, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Why Health Care Matters and the Current Debt Does Not Oct, 2011
“The process by which money is created is so simple that the mind is repelled. (..) The study of money, above all other fields in economics, is one in which complexity is used to disguise truth or to evade truth, not to reveal it. — John Kenneth Galbraith
One source for more quotes is Lars Jorgensen (@LarsDenmar) who has an excellent collection of linked quotes at Homo Sociologicus
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