Some relevant history:
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Keeping in mind that cash is not money.
Money is simply numbers on a ledger. There’s also a fraction of the cash that there is money in the world. That’s what makes cash so valuable nowadays: it’s largely untraceable. You (generic) buy your car or home and many, if not most goods with money. Credit, debit… it’s all traceable. Cash… cash is so rare compared to money that using it for large transactions is immediately suspicious.
Never confuse cash with money. They are not the same. And despite laws, no bank has enough cash to cover all deposits. There’s so much money in existence now, they don’t have the space to store the bills needed to do it.
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Could is doing a lot of heavy lifting in some situations. There’s an interesting paper from the ST. Louis Fed office that talks about the fact that while the rate of unemployment have recovered with the end of the recession, the share of unemployed workers who are unemployed for long periods has increased, particularly among certain age groups (bimodal distribution early and late career). Other papers have found strong regional patterns in long term unemployment. So yeah, outside of a recession the private sector could employ these people, but they don’t.
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Trump did ask why we can’t just print more money… /s
Governments can overspend, and the money required to service the interest on government debt is a real thing. Hopefully this theory shows that austerity slashing is bad while still warning against trying to vote ourselves rich.
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You’re the theorized room-temperature superconsumer? Great Scott, we’ve been looking everywhere for you.
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If America dissolves into fascism or feudalism, historians will note Citizens United as the beginning of the end. That ruling is doing more damage to this country than any of those Russian nukes that we used to worry so much about.
(Edited for increased cromulence)
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Unfortunately, I only reach that state at 42 degrees Kelvin. 
The search continues.
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Good write-up; I fail to see where we disagree, but I’m new to the movement (if not the concepts). My main point is not really a critique of the viability of MMT, just that it requires something we don’t really have, which is democratic control of government fiscal policy (the EU countries explicitly do not have it; the US doesn’t because our democracy is compromised).
It seems to me that MMTers think, strategically, if they can get people over the intellectual hurdle of understanding that tax and inflation are not evils (undoing 40 years of neoclassical orthodoxy) they can win public support for good fiscal policies. But this assumes (incorrectly, IMO) that we don’t have good policy because people are uninformed about the possibilities and not because (in actuality, IMO) we have poor democracy. Such that even when people DO vote to fund infrastructure or climate jobs (and they did, a decade ago) we still don’t get them.
The blindspot MMTers have is the same one most economists have: thinking capitalism, which is inherently in conflict with democracy, can work well for most workers long term.
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I’m not quite clear on this. How can you say that because someone is unemployed, they aren’t part of the supply of labor?
Say in a given year the widget industry ends up with surplus, unsold widgets, and the government buys them. Even though widget consumers had “already passed on” them, surely this affects the supply of widgets?
I’m not much of an economics nerd as I use to be but the way I see is that MMT is a work around the core issues with capitalism which is that the property owning class bottles up the results of production. Look at how houses today still sit empty a decade after Obama and company tried to remedy the situation as an example of what capitalism sows. It’s really something that could be used in the short term but the long term the capital class and the way production is organized will have to be abandoned whether or not we feel comfortable with that prospect.
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It’s because a good portion of the unemployed often give up after a year of job hunting. It’s why the unemployment figures are often wrong by some factor (they only tally those still searching for work). And then there’s the matter of under employed people which happened after the Great Recession. There was, and still are, people who are working lower end jobs despite having the practical skills to work within their desired field. The demand just didn’t return to normal in said field. So having them move to a government funded enterprise that pays better or is closer to their field of interest shouldn’t affect the employment rate with respect to wages in their original vocation.
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