Thread by @StephanieKelton

Ezra's piece is worth reading, though his description of MMT is puzzling. MMT is not about gov being able to spend what it wants b/c it can "print money to pay its debts." What MMT is actually about is, well, the substance of what @ezraklein calls "supply-side progressivism". 1/

https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1493301056054317056

As @M_C_Klein put it, The Deficit Myth "is ultimately a plea to use permanent wartime mobilization for civilian ends." 2/ barrons.com/articles/the-c…

In my book, I introduced the concept of "mission-oriented budgeting". The idea is to *start with where you want to end up* and then work backwards to show how you're actually going to get there. As Alec Stapp (quoted in Ezra's piece) put it, focus on "the ends of production." 3/

Here's an example of me doing this is at a conference on a Green New Deal, where I ask the audience to "think like a beaver." The point is to start with the mission (building a dam) and then work out how to resource it. 4/ vimeo.com/359778899

And here I was back in December 2018, invoking WWII and urging us to draw on those lessons as we think about doing big transformative things. 5/

https://twitter.com/StephanieKelton/status/1069597640508231680?s=20&t=d0adYr5KZiE9ZjQ9RBx7hA

Agree completely with @ezraklein here. We have not seen anything like this from the Biden administration. 6/

But I wrote a whole piece about how the Biden administration could go MUCH bigger *if* it could shift gears and stop thinking about how to "pay for" the spending in conventional terms. 7/ nytimes.com/2021/04/07/opi…

The problem with the way that virtually everyone on the left is trying to justify another fiscal package, is that they're all suggesting that deficit neutral = inflation neutral--it doesn't! A point I stress emphatically in The Deficit Myth. 8/

I realize that some consider it uncouth to point this out, as it gives "aid and comfort" to opponents of a GND. Suffice it to say (for now) that I disagree with these sentiments. It is better to get the economics right than to mislead the public. 9/ nytimes.com/2022/02/11/opi…

So again, MMT isn't about "printing money to pay its debts." It's about understanding the monetary system and the mechanics of government finance well enough to not get bamboozled in an exchange like this one. 10/ stephaniekelton.substack.com/p/jon-stewart-…

It's about understanding that government "borrowing" isn't borrowing in the sense that most people understand the term. 11/ ft.com/content/53cb3f…

And it's about understanding that there are alternatives to raising interest rates to bring down inflation and that rate hikes might even have perverse effects. neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/01/functi…. 12/