Think of the economy like a game of Monopoly. In Monopoly, the bank never runs out of money. It creates money out of thin air. Now, imagine if the players believed the bank will run out of money... They'd make irrational decisions, hoarding cash, and the game would grind to a halt. This is exactly how mainstream economists treat government deficits. They believe the government, like a household, will run out of money.

Imagine your household budget. You can't spend more than you earn without going into debt, right?

Now, imagine if you could create money out of thin air... That's the reality for governments with fiat currency.

Mainstream economists claim that government deficits are bad because they believe the government borrows from the private sector, increasing future tax burdens.

Imagine a seesaw.

On one side, you have the wealthy, on the other, the working class.

Now, picture the Federal Reserve piling weights on the wealthy side.

This is how Quantitative easing (QE) actually works... Quantitative easing (QE) was supposed to stabilize the economy. Instead, it inflated asset prices, benefiting those who already own most of the assets – the rich. The working class? They got crumbs.

@KaiGehring1 @TOClimates @MaxCRoser Sorry Kai. I’m just beyond frustrated by the tendency of economists to ignore the impossibility of production without energy, and their ignorance of just how close we are to exhausting the planet’s stocks of vital inputs to production. To flesh out why: /1 @KaiGehring1 @TOClimates @MaxCRoser (A) Energy. The Cobb Douglas Production Function dominates economic modelling now: L&K in, Y out; no role for energy. When it's included (eg Engström & Gars 2016) it's a 3rd factor in the CDPF with an exponent based on income shares of 0.03. That means, for example, that /2