Yes and no. In the long run, to a first approximation, the issuing own currency bit is irrelevant to public finances. If you want low and stable inflation, you can't finance more than a fraction of a per cent of GDP through printing money.
Yes the BoE is currently buying those gilts, but if the inflation target requires it, and it probably will, most, probably all of the tranche since the pandemic will be reversed.
Although @andyverity is right that formal bankruptcy can be avoided by printing ever more currency, in practice, it probably would not choose this to rule it out, because the inflation that would result would be worse than default.
In fact economically speaking, deliberately causing prices to rise through money printing, so as to reduce the real value of the gilts, leaves the bond holder in the same position as a severe haircut or default.
The primary reason it's all fine is belief in the continuity of the state's ability and preparedness to seek and obtain consent to levy taxes to service the debt and to create policies that grow the economy so that the debt service burden as a share of national income is low.
There was a thread version of this which I wrote in response to an @Aiannucci
BBC don't have to get this wrong and help the government out. There are lots of people on here who can help them understand why this was a false choice, and why the govt retrospectively want to maintain that it was a real one.
Fair enough to say 'the govt will try to paint this as the choice they had to make, that it was an agonizing one, but in fact most experts see this as a false choice, because locking down earlier would have saved lives and £...'
and to follow up with 'and they would argue that the govt is trying to cover up for a failure to see this by continuing to stress a trade-off that wasn't there'
Hopefully this dangerous view won't gain ground on the left, or anywhere. To a first approximation, BoE money creation can't be expected to finance more than a fraction of a percent of GDP.
'Austerity' was a 'scam', but not because we could have set aside inflation targeting and gone for determined monetary financing. We have to expect that most of the balance sheet growth of the BoE will be reversed as a hoped for normalization of the economy materializes.
h/t @JoMicheII whose views seem to be pretty similar.
Vaccines touch on a lot of economic policy questions. You could probably teach most of an econ course through the lens of vaccine policy.
For a start, public funding for free vaccines marks itself out from laissez faire. We could leave the private sector to do the research, manufacturing; and leave it up to the market to decide the price, and up to people whether they have it.
We decided not to, because we thought the market would produce vaccines too slowly, in too small quantities; + we made them free to boost take up which would otherwise factor in only personal health risk and not the wider externality of risks to others.
This is how to do it, lads. Wear a T shirt. T shirts cover your torso while leaving easy access to the upper arm, named for the 'T' shape that makes this possible.
Circulating this wider, as it is an echo of a comment I've seen before, that MMT is progressive and left wing, and conventional macro is right wing and regressive.
This is not so! The main substantive argument is about how the economy and the monetary/financial system works. This is a conversation about positive economics.
From the conclusions of that argument flow, once you have specified the objectives of policy, which you are free to do how you wish, addressing all the problems in political economy as you go in doing so, certain policy prescriptions.