Thread by @rohangrey

I enjoyed the opportunity to chat with @StephanieKelton about this Jon Stewart-Tom Hoenig exchange, which is very illuminating.

stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/jon-stewart-…

But equally cool was seeing Jon Stewart do a 180 on his previous skepticism of #MintTheCoin.

Back in ~'13, Stewart was very dismissive of the trillion dollar coin, as seen in this back-and-forth w Paul Krugman.

businessinsider.com/jon-stewart-vs…

I'm not a fan of Krugman nor do I have much intrinsic respect for the economics "Nobel Prize", but it was notable in these interactions

just how willing Stewart, who often hid(hides) his politics behind the shield of "i'm just a comedian", was to straight-up dismiss Krugman's arguments, not because he had any substantive response to them, but simply because they stretched credulity beyond what he could grasp.

Fast forward 10yrs, & Stewart-whose early 2010's appeal to "restoring sanity" now looks hopelessly naive and dated-is singing a different tune.

Reality, it seems, has demonstrated a well-known absurdist bias.

But the fascinating thing to me is that Stewart still uses the Coin

as a symbol/shorthand for a fiscal ideology one could describe as MMT-consistent, but now instead of seeing that ideology as extreme, Stewart appears to consider it the more sensible view and the orthodoxy as the ridiculous position to hold.

And for me, this is the pedagogical

value of the Coin - whether it provokes a strong negative or positive response initially, the fact it is so simple, so vivid, so basic, allows it to bring clarity to an otherwise completely obscurantist debate.

At first, the shock of it overwhelms the mind, but as that shock

fades, the symbol stays lodged in your head, nagging away in the back of your thinking as you think and read about other budget stuff. "But why not?" is always just there, in the background, and eventually all of the answers to that question become less and less convincing.

I made this point - about the importance of the coin-as-symbol - in my law review article, at the time using Stewart as a foil.

rohangrey.net/files/coinage.…

It is ironic and satisfying that he is now a great example of the same point but from the other side.

/fin