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Trump is just gonna throw another trillion or two on the pile as a bribe..lol (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

You need to continue to think this through.

If taxes are a deflationary mechanism because they remove money from circulation, then that would imply that the opposite is also true; that putting too much money into circulation is, broadly, an inflationary mechanism.

There's a lot of nuance I'm skipping over there, but that's exactly my point. You're taking a very basic, very one dimensional view of MMT and treating it as a license to spend infinite money, when that's not actually what the theory says at all.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    I'm actually not. I'm saying that if you have the ability to print your own money, it is impossible to default on debt owed in that currency. It's not a license to print money, it's an understanding of a logical conclusion.

    This large number is waved around to justify austerity for the poor and without a shred of irony advocate for tax cuts (mostly for the wealthy). I'm just demonstrating why it isn't the boogeyman it's made out to be.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago*

    You're correct that you cannot default, but that doesn't remove the problem, it just changes its shape. There are still plenty of bad things that can happen if you're spending far more than you're taxing.

    And yes, you're absolutely right to say that national debt isn't the bogeyman that conservatives and neoliberals make it out to be. Austerity is a plague and we shouldn't ever embrace that kind of idiotic thinking. I'm the first guy to shove Mark Blyth down the throat of every moronic con and neolib who acts like government debt is a credit card.

    But that doesn't mean that you should reflexively apply that defense of debt and spending in every circumstance without exception. The rate at which the US is accumulating debt, without anything to show for it, is a very real problem that shouldn't simply be handwaved away. These things are not black and white. Details matter.

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