NEW EP! 🎙️ @ecosocialism1 joins @sdgrumbine to explore Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift and why ecological breakdown is rooted in capitalism’s need for endless accumulation. realprogressives.org/mnc-pod…

It was great to talk to you Steve!

This is a story of class. Unfortunately its an old story. It covers the electoral process as well. Control. Power. Placebo effects. In the end, understanding the MOTIVES are absolutely NOT innocent should be the next evolution of MMT activists. No more pollyanna.

Power... class. Sometimes it feels like Christopher Columbus claiming to discover the New World...

U.S. #media didn't just watch #genocide in #Gaza - they enabled it. Corporate press enforced Zionist narratives, dehumanized Palestinians, & hid Israeli war crimes. Listen to our newest @CheeseMacro ep. ft. @MediaPhiled of @ProjectCensored realprogressives.org/mnc-pod…

Geez, once you climb down into one of these holes, it's fkn hard to climb back out; Via the 'Good Man'; x.com/CheeseMacro/status/206…

More thought provoking content from the team that fight tirelessly to educate us all. 👏🏻

Ahhhh finally. Finally. Finally.

This is not a critique of MMT. It is a collage of bad historical analogies. MMT does not say “print forever”. It says a currency issuer is not financially constrained like a household, but is constrained by inflation, real resources, external balance and political capacity. Rome, Weimar and Zimbabwe were not normal modern floating-currency systems with intact productive capacity. They involved collapse, war, reparations, supply destruction, tax failure or institutional breakdown. Nor is Fed QE the same as Treasury spending. QE swaps reserves for securities. Fiscal spending purchases goods, services or labour. Different operation, different transmission. The “distorts price signals from day one” line is Austrian boilerplate. It assumes a neutral monetary price system exists before the state intervenes. It doesn’t. The state is the monopoly issuer of the unit of account. It imposes tax liabilities, then names the prices at which it spends, lends, pays interest and purchases labour, goods and services. The private sector prices relative to that institutional structure. Government spending does not enter from outside and “distort” the price level. It is the price-setting architecture from the start. The real issue is not “money printing”. It is the prices the currency monopolist pays, including the interest rate, which forward-prices money and subsidises holders of financial assets. Japan does not prove your point either. Its high public debt did not produce hyperinflation or bond market insolvency. Whether Japan stagnated is a separate real-economy question. The question is not “can government run out of its own currency?” It cannot. The question is whether public spending, interest rate policy and the prices government pays are consistent with real resource capacity. That is the MMT argument. You are attacking a straw man.

It is not an arbitrary redefinition. Most textbook “definitions” of money do not actually define money; they describe its functions: medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value, means of payment. The MMT tax-credit view is doing something different. It distinguishes money, money-things, and money-functions. Money is the unit of account: pound, dollar, yen. Money-things are instruments or records denominated in that unit: coins, notes, tally sticks, reserve balances, bank deposits, and ledger entries. Money-functions are what those instruments may do: mediate exchange, store value, settle payments, discharge debts. So “money is a tax credit” is best read as a shorthand. More precisely: state money-things are tax credits denominated in the state’s unit of account. The state defines the unit, imposes liabilities in that unit, and accepts particular instruments denominated in that unit back in payment of taxes, fees and fines. That creates baseline demand. The gain is analytical: it distinguishes currency issuer from currency user. Taxpayers do not fund the state with a pre-existing thing the state needs. Taxpayers need state-accepted instruments because the state has made them liable in its unit. Bank deposits are private money-things denominated in the state unit. They settle tax obligations through the banking system, ultimately via state money-things (tax credits) at the central bank. MMT observes that the monetary system is a public monopoly. The issuer creates demand by taxation and sets price by what it pays. The constraint is not “finding the money”, but real resources. (Gold is not money. Gold is a mineral. A gold coin may be a money-thing if it is a denominated instrument within a monetary system established by government.)