Thread by @soncharm

My followers know I’m the most MMT-friendly righty wacko you’re gonna find on this websight. But even I don’t get what MMTers think they’re saying sometimes.

Like, when they talk about a government implementing its ‘priorities’.

Much of MMT is about getting rid of the budget/deficit constraint. That constraint isn’t ‘real’, it’s just ‘financial’. Governments (with a sovereign currency or whatever) needn’t feel (and aren’t) bound by it.

Things don’t need to be ‘paid for’ by taxes. Spending comes first.

So far so good.

So under (dumb) standard political economics, when politicians say they don’t want to implement a thing cuz it will ‘add $X billion to the deficit’, that’s a dumb reason. There can be good reasons, but that’s not one.

Right yes got it.

What do MMTers think should happen instead? Something like:

Congress should ‘decide on society’s priorities’, and then choose to spend on them.

Question: how do you ‘prioritize’ in the absence of a constraint? And why *would* you?

‘Prioritizing’ things - to rank-order or triage them, to say ‘this is more important than that’ - is something you only even need to do if you have something like...well...a ‘budget’. Things cost C and the C’s can add up to no more than budget B.

That makes the tradeoffs explicit, the shadow-costs quantified. If guns will cost 6 and butter will cost 2, one then can try to evaluate, is it worth forgoing three butters for every gun? Is it worth giving up a gun to have three more butters?

MMTers will say: we recognize constraints, dummy. The constraints are based on ‘real resources’. Congress can’t buy everyone a pony if there’s more people than ponies.

Yes yes fine but in practice how does that conversation work.

MMTers seem to invoke the image of Congress having an airy discussion about ‘priorities’ in the absence of anything resembling *numbers* that anyone will be able to point to.

You don’t like ‘deficit’ driven reasoning fine, but at least it gives us *some* numbers.

The basic problem is, what’s a ‘priority’? Answer: everything!

Is the environment a priority? Sure! How about homelessness? Yup! Drug treatment? Yes! Auto safety, public schooling, social security, medical-radiation regulation....yes, yes, and yes

I list only a bunch of stuff lefties (and most MMTers) probably like to illustrate the point. What does it even mean to ‘have a discussion about society’s priorities’ if there aren’t any numbers involved? It just means saying Yes to everything. Why say No to anything?

There’s no reason to ‘prioritize’ here, it doesn’t even make sense. Is that anti-opioid program to be ‘prioritized’ above an anti-soot clean air regulation? Or vice versa?

Well wait, why ‘prioritize’ either? Just do both. Yes, we like both. There’s no shadow cost to speak of.

So, when MMTers speak of a government ‘deciding on society’s priorities, and then implementing them’, what *exactly* do they mean?

Because all I can envision is making a wishlist, devoid of all reference to anything like a ‘cost’, and then stamping a big YES on it.

And remember, MMTers recognize there’s no free lunch. They understand that economics is about tradeoffs.

But what’s there to trade off here?

‘The real binding constraint is inflation.’ What I can imagine, then, is cooking up some kind of Inflation Impact Score for each existing and proposed gov’t action. Guns add 6 Inflations, while butter adds 2 Inflations.

Then one can weigh them against each other, like before.

Ok, in principle. But how in the heck is *that* gonna be calculated?

Here’s a poor-man’s way of calculating an Inflation Impact Score: the...deficit impact.

MMTers say that’s wrong. Not all deficit spending adds the same Inflations. I don’t disagree!

But what else is there?