again, the Communists have you covered. There's this awesome bit in the book where Ms. Kelton takes every economist of the late '40s and '50s to task over their fear of deficits for believing that deficit spending would lead to insolvency in the future (again, this is a woman who never says "debt service"). She then laughs and points at them and says that the '40s and '50s were some of our years of greatest expansion without saying a single goddamn thing about the '70s. In that moment, anyway. Much later she uses the massive debt of the '60s as the reason for pulling out of Breton Woods but never once connects those two events together. The real dividing line between the MMTers and everyone else is that the MMTers say "we can do this without consequence" while everyone else argues about what the consequences are likely to be. I've seen any number of charts that indicate every rise in the stock markets since 2008 is directly tied to money printed by the Fed. We've had our inflation, it's just been in the NYSE, S&P and NASDAQ. But Ms. Kelton never touches that either.I want the government to buy me and everyone else in the country a mansion on 5 acres.
On a more serious note, I think the reason people started taking this garbage seriously is because the government has printed an ungodly amount of money since 2008 without any increase in inflation.
Breton Woods was already de facto pulled out of by 1947, because of, ahem, massive government debt in Europe that the US had to subsidize. Attempts to say otherwise are not historically accurate, but I can't imagine historical accuracy is pertinent to this type of fantasy. Offset payments don't really work when denominated in a single government's currency, because you know, the locals sort of like to use their own currency for shit at the hardware store and restaurants and whatnot. And unless or until a country can produce all of its own goods without trade, or we become a One World Government, we're pretty much stuck with trade imbalances, and at least one country involved in the trade is going to use another government's money in those situations (although it's both countries a lot of the time). There are times when I think I couldn't respect Bernie Sanders any less than I already do, but then I always find a way to go lower. Edit to say that those bunkers made my day. I can't believe I've never some across that before.
As a self-described socialist, I find it incredibly disappointing that the Sanders campaign resorted to this kind of imaginary economics in order to pay for their proposed policies. Numerous European social democracies show that you can operate that kind of government without the magical money printer that the US allegedly operates. There might have been more widespread support for important policies like Medicare for All if there was a real way to pay for it.
If Stephanie Kelton were an engineer, she would draw the free body diagram to solve the statics of the problem directly in front of her, and then argue that because the solution balances in her model, the rest of reality can be disregarded. "trade" is another word that does not enter this book. Considering the entire argument for MMT rests on the dollar being the world's reserve currency, you'd think there'd be some analysis about why, exactly, the dollar is the world's reserve currency, or what happens when transactions are entered in other currencies, or what happens when a currency's sovereignty is challenged, stuff like that. Nope. None. Nothing. The sun always sets on the British Empire, always has, always will, forever and ever amen. All other countries should read this book because they might learn something about how to run their countries. She actually says that. I know about Albanian Mushrooms because of the War Nerd:
I shared that War Nerd story, so I guess I did hear of it once upon a time. Not a scrap of recollection. Not at all relevant to this discussion, but just because I haven't thought of the War Nerd in a long time. One of his blog posts about the genesis of Boko Haram sent me down a giant rabbit hole of reading a bunch of Chinua Achebe's books, which in turn got me reading a ton about decolonialization in general. He could do that. Style and substance all the way down. I miss it.