******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ******************** #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. *****************************************************************
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/09/opinion/us-deficit-coronavirus.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage Here is another article written by an advocate of Modern Monetary Theory. Those advocates seem to be saying that this is a panacea - simply keep printing up and spending money because debt doesn't matter. Debt might not matter, but money supply does. As the author writes, "If any government tries to spend too much into an economy that’s already running at full speed, inflation will accelerate. So there are limits. However, the limits are not in our government’s ability to spend money or to sustain large deficits. What M.M.T. does is distinguish the real limits from wrongheaded, self-imposed constraints." Yes, just the tiny little detail of inflation. Maybe my age is showing, but I remember the good old days of the late 1970s, when unemployment and inflation were both high. Inflation was in double digits and rising. It was called "stagflation". So, it doesn't even require low unemployment to send the economy into an inflationary spiral. And in fact, we have already seen rampant inflation in recent years - in both the stock market and in real estate values. These are the two arenas in which the more wealthy invest their dollars. The lower 2/3, struggling to get by, haven't seen much inflation in what they purchase, because they don't purchase much. Even there, though, inflation has been a lot more than what they admit. One of the things they did was, starting in 1980, change the way inflation was calculated. If we used that previous method, we'd be seeing inflation of about about 7% right now. See: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts John Reimann -- *“Science and socialism go hand-in-hand.” *Felicity Dowling Check out:https:http://oaklandsocialist.com also on Facebook _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
