If I take this lady at her word, I can wonder no more and start to understand that Bernie and AOC and the other "crazy lefties" may actually have it just about right.
And that in itself is pretty fuckin' scary for a hard-core(ish) capitalist like your favorite blogger.
Anyway, here's Stephanie Kelton, PhD, trying to lay it out for me in a way that doesn't make my head hurt as badly as would normally be the case for me.
The big easy take-away for me is her concept of balance - ie: a deficit on the government side always equals a surplus on the private side, and vice versa. That's the Zero-Sum Game that matters.
And it works the same on the macro scale as well. A trade deficit in USAmerica Inc is always in balance with a surplus somewhere else.
The 2nd point is that, yes, it seems wildly counter-intuitive and unwise and crazy and stoopid just to create whatever money we need by pushing a few buttons on a computer keyboard in Steve Mnuchin's office, but it really doesn't matter how much "funny money" we conjure up out of thin air as long as most of us maintain a sufficient level of confidence in the system, and - muy importante - as long inflation is under the magic 5% mark, which according to Dr Kelton is about the only real constraint we have to worry about.
What remains for me to figure out:
The people "in charge" have to know about all this, but they keep acting like they don't know what's going on, so what are those fuckers up to behind our backs as they're doing the shit that's going on?
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