Don Jr explains to Fox hosts the "dry run" conspiracy against his "likes" and "new follows" on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/ub00ge65H8
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 25, 2019
I find that as often as not I agree with Matt Bruenig on policy matters. But those points of agreement can be obscured for me by differences of temperament and politics. Here though I find myself entirely in agreement with him on something called Modern Monetary Theory. You may not even have heard this phrase before. But you should and probably will soon. If you haven’t, you should familiarize yourself with it because it bulks very large in many current debates within the Democratic Party that you have heard about. It’s a big deal. Bruenig aptly describes it as “about using word games to make people believe that the US can have Northern European levels of government spending without Northern European levels of taxation.”
It’s not easy to simply explain what MMT is because it operates at several distinct and not always closely related levels. Read More
Roger Stone paramilitary group continues posting on his behalf even post-gag order.
Chances of Senate GOPs bucking President Trump on emergency declaration slip from unlikely to all but impossible.
In a plea for a lenient sentence Paul Manafort’s lawyers told Judge Amy Berman Jackson today that Manafort had spent “a lifetime promoting American democratic values and assisting emerging democracies to adopt reforms necessary to become a part of Western society.” Read More
British PM Theresa May has announced today that if her latest Brexit proposal fails Parliament will vote on delaying Brexit or proceeding to a no-deal Brexit. The failure of her latest plan seems highly likely, if not certain. That would simply match every other plan she’s cobbled together. I have not followed the inner workings of each of these deals to have much ability to predict. The basic issue has been clear for a while. There’s no majority for any actual deal since the whole thing was sold on false pretenses, with false promises and none of the challenging obstacles in view.
But if Parliament votes for a delay, it’s hard for me to see how that doesn’t sound the death knell of Brexit altogether. It has been crystal clear that there’s no parliamentary majority for any actual Brexit plan, though perhaps the concept could get a bare majority. Without the hammer of a deadline, why will it move forward at all? Read More
Ivanka debuts as admin spokesperson for rugged individualism: "I don't think most Americans want to be given something. People want to work for what they get." pic.twitter.com/RerMUQ7aIj
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) February 26, 2019
Printing some responses from readers to my post from yesterday about the slippery politics of MMT. From TPM Reader PJ …
I read with interest your thoughts on MMT, and am in the kind of academic circles where people will give talks where they think about and discuss MMT as part of some suite of solutions to the excesses or problems of late capitalism (or even straight up liberalism, in the conventional sense). I think perhaps both you and Matt are focusing too much on the practicalities of MMT rather than its rhetorical function, though there might be reasons to maintain the skepticism, there’s another possibility about policy facilitation therein.
Printing some responses from readers to my post from yesterday about the slippery politics of MMT. From TPM Reader A …
Hi, Josh. I’m an economist and Prime member (hoping to upgrade soon but have to convince hubs of necessity of expense first…). I read you every day, and the work you and your staff do is indispensable.
I just read your MMT post, and it is spot on. I would go even further. I consider MMTers to be the left-wing equivalent of Hayek/gold standard acolytes. Both of them defy what we know about how the economy works, theoretically and empirically.
Printing some responses from readers to my post from yesterday about the slippery politics of MMT. From TPM Reader MO …
What we have now is a fiat currency pretending it’s still on a gold standard. That is, we have a financial system designed around using the natural scarcity of commodity commodity money, but we’ve abandoned commodity money. oddly, we persist in acting like money is in natural limited supply, and we can only get more of it by taking taxes, say.