Tuesday, June 9, 2020

The Mad Lady of Money Printing: Trillion Dollar Deficits Are Welcome

Stephanie Kelton
The new book by Stephanie Kelton, a professor of economics and public policy at Stony Brook University, is out today.

I haven't read the book yet, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy but I am sure it will provide me with a good dose of science fiction that will last for decades.

She has a teaser op-ed in The New York Times titled, Learn to Love Trillion-Dollar Deficits, where she advocates for more government deficit spending. Trillions worth, of course.

It is nutty stuff and I plan to give the book a real good once over.

Stay tuned.

-RW



4 comments:

  1. I predict this op-ed will become an infamous classic. Hold on to it. Kelton lays bare the authoritarian impulse behind her thinking. "Taxes exist for many reasons, but they exist mainly to give value to a state’s otherwise worthless tokens." This concept is explained with two examples: A father's forcing obedience from his children by demanding they return his chits for, say, food and shelter. Great Britain laying taxes on its colonial population, payable only in sterling, in order to cement its political controls and naked exploitation of an area's resources. And the clincher to all this takes the cake: she has no fear of any inflation in the absence of any idle capacity. This Peronist recipe has been now adopted by both major political parties.

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  2. Hope you can check it out from the public library so you don't actually end up supporting the author financially. :)

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    1. Publisher is sending me a copy.

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    2. You've got to wonder about the publisher's choice. They must be pretty sure that their market are not going to be persuaded by reason or evidence. In other words, it would seem that their desire to facilitate your review means that they believe that no dismantling of that book you are likely to do will cause them to lose sales. They may even believe that your dismantling of the book will only cause the author's credibility among the likely audience to rise. It's scary to think that they may be right.

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