No, but it illustrates the principles in actual use at the remarkable scale of 21T USD.Butcher Bob wrote: The article never mentions MMT.
Is there *any* evidence linking the DoD audit to the financial crisis of 2007-8? That crisis had nothing to do with that audit, indeed it was the direct result of the largest deliberate financial fraud in known human history.The last time I saw a military audit discussed was Sept. 10, 2001.. The military had $2.3 trillion unaccounted for, and Rumsfeld was going to get to the bottom of it. The next day, both the main location and the back-up site containing all relevant information were destroyed. Seven years later the financial sector crashes requiring a massive cash infusion, paid for by citizens. So you can't exactly put these two sectors up as a "good" example of how well MMT works.
Every single one of those supposed "MMT tenets" is a cartoon strawman of what MMT actually says. It says none of those things. Deficits and debt matter in that they put can put an inflationary pressure on a currency. Absent that inflationary pressure (and a certain amount of currency inflation is by consensus a positive thing, you need a buffer to avoid proximity to a deflationary trap), deficits have little real economic impact. You've obviously never read or studied MMT beyond a few depricatory sound bites by its detractors.MMT has some ludicrous basic tenets...(and these were from an advocating Yale economics professor mind you)...
Deficits don't matter...you can run huge deficits for as long as you want because they just don't matter.
Debt doesn't matter...you can run up as much debt as you want, because it just doesn't matter.
QE doesn't matter...a country is a sovereign entity with the ability to print money, therefore it can print and spend as much as it wants.
It's all just paper (currency and T-bills) that the government is shuffling around.
...as if we live in a fukking vacuum.
The pernicious "household budget" (credit card) framing here is greviously economically illiterate. Macroeconomics involving sovereign fiat currency issuers have no useful parallels to you, your personal household budget, or your credit card standing. It's like trying to model Quantum Mechanics with 17th century Newtonian mechanics. It *feels* intuitively like it should work because it is familiar, but it cannot begin to.We are not the only player on this planet, so in fact all these things DO matter...very much. This is just another tool of the elite to steal from the masses and run up the credit card of future generations.
I'm going to link to a video of Stephanie Kelton who are welcome to summarily dismiss as a "crackpot" in spite of the fact that she has forgotten more about high-level econimics than either of us will ever know.
Wikipedia biographical summary-
Stephanie Kelton
Born October 10, 1969 (age 49)
Institution University of Missouri–Kansas City
School or
tradition Post-Keynesian economics
Alma mater California State University, Sacramento (B.S., B.A., 1995)
University of Cambridge (M.Phil, 1997)
The New School (Ph.D., 2001)
Contributions Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
Stephanie Kelton née Bell (born 1969) is an American economist and Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Stony Brook University.[1] She was formerly Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City,[2] Chief Economist on the U.S. Senate Budget Committee 2015 minority party staff and an Economic Advisor to Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign. She is founder and editor-in-chief of the blog New Economic Perspectives. She is a leading proponent of Modern Monetary Theory[3] and as such was named one of Politico's 50 "thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics in 2016."[4][5]
Watch it, it's an hour twenty minutes. Or don't, if you don't want your fixed and obviously erroneous preconceptions of what MMT is and isn't disrupted. If you don't have an open mind watching this will infuriate/baffle and confuse you. Because economic reality isn't anything like what we've been taught and what we are comfortable with. Like I said above, MMT doesn't care whether you or I or anyone else believe in it, it is instead the most accurate and objective description of economic truth we have.
I'm betting you won't make it halfway through her talk before you have to bail out due to incipient cognitive dissonence making you too uncomfortable to continue. Probably better not to even try to expand your intellectual horizons, learning that also involves unlearning is never easy to do.