Hari, thank you for those quotes. The public debt has always been the way capitalist (and pre-capitalist, I would say) nations financed war, exploration and conquest in general.
What changed in the period of the 1930s was the idea that if the "people" controlled the government, they could use the public debt to provide services to the people and make public investments that in effect INTERFERED with capitalists' exclusive rights to make investments and thereby gain private profit by owning the fruits of those investments -- In the US, TVA and federal relief, Social Security, Public works programs --- all interfered with private profit. The right wing, thereby, mounted a challenge to those activities. They tried to attack them on the substance (TVA = "socialism") but that didn't work --- so they tried to attack "government wasteful spending" and argued that deficit spending ENABLED that. Allegedly President Eisenhower rejected requests to help the French fight off the VIet Minh at Dien Bien Phu when he was told it would create a budget deficit. (Right after WW II< there were a few years of budget surpluses while the government paid down some of the WW II National Debt). The argument against deficit financing got stronger and stronger as deficits seemed impossible to cut (in absolute terms they started to grow with rearmament and never stopped growing because of Korea, Vietnam and the entire period of :"military Keynesianism"). By the time of the Clinton Adminsitration -- it was considered "obvious" that a government cannot "tax and spend" itself into prosperity (WHEN IN FACT, that is exactly what we had done during WW II --- amazing historical amnesia for which I blame too many members of the economics profession as well as almost every journalist who ever wrote about it!). Yes, Reich and Krugman and many others have warned against this --- my favorite on this goes all the way back into the early 1980s --- its the British economist Tom Palley --- But the arguments of people like James Buchanan had more sway with politicians and their economist enablers (His book DEMOCRACY IN DEFICIT is a piece of shit --- sorry for the non-academic language --- but it's goddam influential) --- Journalists have probably been the most dangerous enablers of the "deficit demonization syndrome" Thanks again for the quotes from Marx (STephanie Kelton is a proponent of Modern Monetary Theory who has tried to make the point that the demonization of deficits is a form of economic theoretical gaslighting.) On Sun, Jul 14, 2024 at 4:59 AM hari kumar via groups.io <hari6.kumar= [email protected]> wrote: > Hello Michael: > > 1) I do not know the name Stephanie Kelton. > But were not Robert Reich and Paul Krugman always going on about how the > "deficit mountain" was not only irrelevant but was over-magnified as a > threat? Am I wrong in this recall? > Don't they count as 'Democrat' advisers etc? Regardless - I agree there > has been a shift in tone and emphasis. > > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#31150): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/31150 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/107175980/21656 -=-=- 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. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
