Rep
@AyannaPressley
has made history by introducing a Federal Job Guarantee Resolution. She now helps lead the way towards the unfinished work of the Civil Rights Movement and the Economic Bill of Rights. Cheers to everyone that helped make this possible
To become a billionaire you have to monopolize industry, discipline your work force, push down wages, minimize their share of surplus, have a never ending supply of credit, authority over government and law, minimize public spending to keep people in private debt, collect rents
ELON: THE FEDERAL DEFICIT IS INSANE. THIS JUST CAN'T KEEP GOING.
"The federal budget deficit is insane.
It's like $3 trillion.
Federal expenditures are $7 trillion.
Federal revenue is $4 trillion.
That's a $3 trillion difference.
If this was a company, it'd be a $3
The complete gutting and implosion of the Build Back Better Bill should mark the end of the absurd and destructive “pay-for” and “tax-payer” framing of public budgets among progressives and the left. But I won’t hold my breath just yet. We will not and cannot win like this
Very excited to have worked on this with co-authors
@StephanieKelton
and
@gregorytcarlock
in the
@HuffPost
- It is time to be bold with what are strive to accomplish, our future livelihood depends on it!
NEW: Kamala Harris struggles to answer after a reporter asks her about her economic policy, says “return on investment” four times.
Reporter: Can you explain how you're gonna pay for your policies?
Harris: Well, I mean, you just look at it in terms of what we are talking about,
@SonyaShaykhoun
Yep. And I think drawing on a sense of nativist superiority is as unhinged and cringeworthy now as it was in the 19th century which the psychotic villains in the movie above depict
"We're not gonna stay in their frame... We're not gonna play their game. We're gonna call them out for the weird stuff they believe and we presented a different argument to the American public. One where everybody matters." 🙏 make this man VP
#wewantwalz
Loved catching up with my sister in solidarity today... dropping off this gift thanks to the kind people over at Macmillan Publishers International authored by Randall Wray, Bill Mitchell, and Martin Watts! Onward we go!
I’m seeing people shocked about latinos in TX counties like Zapata and Starr trending Trump. Do we realize these communities are FLOODED with private prisons law enforcement border patrol and fossil fuel money mostly brought there by local D's. This has CONSEQUENCES
:DEEP BREATH: Taxing the rich is great for its own sake but is not required in order to PAY FOR public spending - We don’t depend on the rich to begin investing in social transformation and human needs now! Conceding to tax payer money framing deeply limits political horizons 📢
Stop asking Elon Musk to just “pay his fair share of taxes”. Let’s abolish his hoarding of wealth and power over society all together. Make him obsolete. Our government’s social investments don’t depend on his tax dollars. He depends on the public’s laws, subsidies, and workers
I’ve noticed it’s now common practice in Colombia to use the letter e instead of gendered masculine o for general contexts. Some even use the x. This all to say that the notion that challenging linguistic orthodoxies is only a US graduate school thing is ludicrous and so dumb
Gonna say it again and again. Richard Nixon & conservative celebrity economist Milton Friedman wanted a UBI because it would help dismantle broader social changes in favor of an *insufficient* cash transfer that stripped away political power from those that need it most
I’m really enjoying watching the
@GravelInstitute
just surgically and methodically ruin
@prageru
’s public standing by exposing their horrific fascist propaganda for what it is
People from around the *world* are messaging me to congratulate on
@AOC
’s slam dunk reelection and
@JamaalBowmanNY
’s win. This is a big deal, the world is watching and the movement is growing
Things to know about Colombia: Clinton’s Plan Colombia was a human rights and environmental disaster. The FBI listed Uribe, the right wing hero and current shadow President, as associated with Escobar in 91. Land distribution in the countryside is near feudal
Amazing how many people reductively and arrogantly think society actually works like this. For one, it is incredibly rare that anything that effects a moment in time of supply would not also effect a moment in time of demand
Literally just taught this graph in Econ 101 this afternoon, and I had to work hard not to laugh and explain that politics can lead people to forget it.
#TeachEcon
Government debt in a currency it itself issues is necessary to build a robust economy. Government debt in a currency it does not issue, like dollars in Latin America, puts a country/region at a major disadvantage. This is a huge insight more progressives need to understand
😂Milei has asked the communists to help him pay off the increasing debt he's saddled with. Unpayable dollarised debt and the oligarchs' financial offshoring have always been the main problems, not 'socialism' or 'deficits'.
Something
@AOC
doing is reshaping the political boundaries of race and gender away from careerism and individualism and towards the common good, working class dignity, and moral courage. She’s making this mainstream so our policies have a broad and inclusive movement to stand on
The Duque government has shut down the internet across many cities in Colombia and are actively removing videos on IG and FB demonstrating incidents of military and police violence
Fresh off the presses. I have a new Working Paper out for the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity (
@GISP_Tweets
) on Modern Monetary Theory and today’s inflationary pressures. Enjoy 😉
@BradKort
@fteconomics
It’s not an “ad hominem” to point out a statement as *very* stupid because of how insanely factually wrong and twisted it is. Why do you weirdos always misuse the ad hominem fallacy 😂
What we call government “borrowing” is simply the way governments drain bank reserves by issuing treasuries with the purpose of managing interest rates. Thats it. It’s an outdated Gold standard era practice that nobody in the orthodoxy seems to understand
Broke: Chasing after profits pleading the rich to give us money to “fund” some programs
Woke: Making the super rich obsolete using our intellect and labor to shift wealth at the point of production & distribution while setting legal limits on obscene concentrations of power
Many of us hold progressive values and goals but get hung up on tropes like taxpayer 💴 and thinking of Government as a household.
@StephanieKelton
lays out the framework we need to unlearn failed econ and rediscover our public imaginations in a rigorous and accessible manner!
Banon and cronies are training people how to take over school boards through very specific arguments inciting moral panic around identity, deservingness, and the threat posed by the Other. Yet the left is still hung up on an absolutist zero sum dialectic and tax payer politics
We should take Biden’s student debt cancellation as a crucially important crack in the door to cancel all student debt and remake higher education in the public interest
The Quantity Theory of Money is a gimmick because conventional economic theory is a gimmick because the barter story is a gimmick because immanent value theories are a gimmick because ontological univocity is a gimmick because language is rather gimmicky
Update on Colombia. Mass demonstrations successfully defeated the regressive tax proposal and the ministry of finance is set to resign. Working with a few Senators to develop a public employment agenda. Pay-for and austerity economics must be dismantled in the Global South
#MMT
Having a late night stroll through NYC and just want to say that homelessness is bullshit and we are a really sick and depraved society to allow it to exist
Happy to announce I will be a 2021 Post Growth Institute Fellow (
@postgrowth
) bringing my thoughts and experiences with MMT, policy studies, leadership, and critical theory to the conversation on ecology and social transformation
Yes the guy born and raised in apartheid South Africa currently pushing Nazi race science is also fixated on so called unsustainable public deficits because monetarist views of money and support for austerity is always ultimately linked back to deranged supremacist politics
I guess this need repeating again but it is possible to both have an analysis that sees the US’s foreign policy history as contributing to this crisis that needs to be radically changed AND recognizing the Russian regime’s imperialist far right politics & inexcusable aggression
Stephanie Kelton has too much class and poise to rub Summers’ face in with all the horrible things he’s said and done. Millennials like myself however, are ready to go scorched earth for what they’ve done to our future. And as we achieve increasing authority and power, we will
One of my proudest accomplishments in life is contributing to making Modern Monetary Theory mainstream so that a growing section of the public could see how utterly absurd this all sounds and how toxic deficit reduction politics is
In 2021, I published a paper advocating for a better theory of inflation that among other things, argues companies were price gouging the public. Back then the idea was considered fringe. Today, it is basically mainstream. We ain’t fucking around folks👇🏼
The tax payer money myth is so backwards and toxic that I’ve heard some suggest a tax strike to stop funding rural red areas that allegedly just exploit urban tax revenue. How about we meet everyone’s needs w/ public money & reject bigoted impulses wherever they are
@Nitzky89
Hernandez said Hitler was a genius and then he confused him with Einstein. He also said “We need businessmen to understand that the best business in the world is poor people. Because they have the ability to consume, the poor consume all the money,” Such a leftie
People: rent food and gas is getting expensive
Orthodox Macroeconomists:
Ok here’s what we’re gonna do, first - cause a recession, then throw you out of a job, then….”
I think it’s time for adjuncts to consider a mass strike in the name of their own human dignity and in solidarity with the under funded departments they represent
What’s the most annoying part of NYC politics and why is it egocentric white guys with mediocre and obtuse politics passing themselves as the charitable purveyors of progressive and leftist ideas
White supremacy is a fascist existential threat. The left needs to stop fucking around with their childish fantasy about everything being reducible to economics alone. Especially white leftists and those that called for alliances with alt right “populists”. You’re part of this
Wow go listen to
@owenslindsay1
explain how prices are actually set on earth to this CNBC host, who naively believes that “supply and demand” exonerates large companies from any culpability in fueling inflation. (I hope the Harris campaign is paying attention to her!)
Robert Reich and Richard Wolff have different ideological orientations both seeking economic justice and transformation. But yet they both submit to the assumptions of economic orthodoxy when it comes to money, finance, and macro economics. This is the power of neoliberalism
It’s a mistake to say money is fake if it is not rooted in something physical or concrete. In that sense words and ideas are fake too. But as we know, we need all of the above to mediate social reality. The challenge is working with abstraction to arrange the best world possible
Like “crime” viewed as a terrible problem *outside* NYC in the suburbs, the border is viewed as a problem away from the border. Border communities are actually constantly under attack by the rest of the state mirroring the legacy of Mexican-US liminal spaces.
Saying Free money and printing money are both incoherent-dumb terms used to try to provide deep analysis of macroeconomics and or critique modern monetary theory but exposes how the most important insights of a monetary-economy have not been understood
Bolivia has an inflation rate of 0.94% & public deficit of 12.72%, double the U.S. Japan 2.5% inflation to 7.8% deficit. In a world of responsible science, the economics profession could no longer mindlessly push money supply inflation positive correlations let alone causality
Truth is that
@StephanieKelton
&
@ptcherneva
are rockstars and world builders because their work frees economics from technocratic value free modeling. Their approach to budgets and employment recognizes that any worthy economic theory must be BOTH descriptive AND perspective
There is a dangerous overlap imo between not taking fascism seriously & believing that the culture war is just a distraction. At best it’s a blind spot, at worst a capitulation to a far right that understands how to weaponize culture towards extremist ends as we are witnessing
Watching people tear each-other down from the inside yet allegedly seeking same goals and I’m like, nah I’m good. Absolutely heartbreaking. All I know is I’m damn proud of our contribution to one of the most progressive/transformative policy agendas out there. The ideas live on
JUST IN: US GDP soared to a blockbuster 4.9% in Q3. That’s the highest since the end of 2021 and a big uptick from 2.1% in Q2.
Strong consumer spending and gov’t spending drove the growth.
Bottom line: No recession in sight.
Do you always hear about the so called bipartisan budget surpluses of the 1990’s? Turns out they were not a good thing and actually premised on private sector debt and a stock market bubble. Listen to
@StephanieKelton
break it down on
@PodFunnyMoney
! Shout out to
@DeanBaker13
!
Hate to keep beating this drum but Latin American progressives lack a good macro economic strategy and vision due to certain orthodoxies and so time and time again the far right dominates the social imaginary on the economy. It doesn’t have to be this way
Tell me again now MMT has nothing to do with power. Mitch McConnell is holding up $2000 payments by obscuring the political dimensions of money in the form of alleged technocratic constraints (borrowing) and the claim that wealthy people would receive checks
Ok folks. I heard your calls for diversity and inclusion in more accurately representing the “MMT Haters United Front”. I am sorry. I have upgraded the cube to better capture the full scope and range of economic expertise
My latest in
@businessinsider
with
@NathanTankus
and
@RaulACarrillo
! Time to rattle some cages and face reality! No more middlemen and money mazes! Let’s end the myth that public spending relies on “tax payer money” Time to talk about resources and goals!
And lastly, it’s sickening to see self righteous “left” pundits burst in joy at this fall-out because the campaign wasn’t identical to their definition of the left ie: following white and class reductive scripts set by gate keepers. Who get away with shit all the time
I’m revisiting David Graeber’s book, Debt and there are some truly remarkable insights. For starters, chapter 9’s discussion of the Axial Age makes a beautiful case for 1) how commodity money via coinage is a major driver of imperial economies of war, slavery, profit, and
I really can’t stress enough as a philosopher and social theorist by training how ridiculous the vast majority of mainstream economist’s “models” are as accurate reflections of the organized social provisioning process we call “the economy”
@NickHanauer
Krugman has staked his career on the IS-LM model that Hicks, its inventor, later rejected. Krugman’s model(s) of the economy are contorted & based on unrealistic assumptions. MMT, a simpler model based on more realistic assumptions threatens the intellectual edifice he’s built.
My adult life has been dedicated to examining the tension between rigorous scholarship and improving lives at the intersection of philosophy, social theory, and political economy, to best I can. This here 👇🏼 and above, are ALL reasons why I’m with MMT. This is a paradigm shift
Imagine the dumbest most emotionally stunted people on this social media who worship Milton Friedman and Elon Musk and have convinced themselves they are actually brilliant. That is who has won the Presidency in Argentina. It’s disgusting
Sweden has a far right government that just abolished their Ministry of the Environment and rejects so called “feminist foreign policy”. Even the idealized bastions of social democracy are vulnerable to fascism when the essence and scope of politics is tax to spend nationalism