{"id":54931,"date":"2020-09-07T09:48:04","date_gmt":"2020-09-07T14:48:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=54931"},"modified":"2020-09-07T09:48:04","modified_gmt":"2020-09-07T14:48:04","slug":"book-review-the-deficit-myth-modern-monetary-theory-and-the-birth-of-the-peoples-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=54931","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

BOOK REVIEW: THE DEFICIT MYTH: MODERN MONETARY THEORY AND THE BIRTH OF THE PEOPLE\u2019S ECONOMY<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

In January, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its Budget and Economic outlook for 2020 to 2030. It is horrific reading. Federal budget deficits are projected to rise from $1.0 trillion this year to $1.3 trillion over the next 10 years.<\/p>\n

Federal debt will rise to 98% of GDP by 2030, \u201cits highest percentage since 1946,\u201d the CBO says. \u201cBy 2050, debt would be 180% of GDP\u2014far higher than it has ever been.\u201d And that was before Covid-19 hit. Now those numbers will be much, much worse.<\/p>\n

On top of this, politicians have been announcing grand schemes for further spending: $47 billion on free college tuition, $1 trillion for new infrastructure, $1.4 trillion to write off student loan debt, at least $7 trillion on the Green New Deal and $32 trillion on Medicare for All. By one estimate, these new proposals total an estimated $42.5 trillion over the next decade.<\/p>\n

Adding these new spending proposals to the flood of red ink the CBO projects just from following the current path, the federal government is set to face a serious fiscal crisis in the not-too-distant future.<\/p>\n

KEEP PRINTING<\/p>\n

Or, perhaps not. There is an idea afoot in economics that, as Bernie Sanders\u2019 former economic advisor Stephanie Kelton argues in her new book\u00a0The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People\u2019s Economy<\/em>, could revolutionize the field in the same way that Copernicus did to astronomy by showing that the earth orbited the sun.<\/p>\n

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) states that \u201cin almost all instances federal deficits are good for the economy. They are necessary.\u201d That being so, we don\u2019t have to worry about this coming deluge of red ink, indeed:<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BOOK REVIEW: THE DEFICIT MYTH: MODERN MONETARY THEORY AND THE BIRTH OF THE PEOPLE\u2019S ECONOMY In January, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its Budget and Economic outlook for 2020 to 2030. It is horrific reading. Federal budget deficits are projected to rise from $1.0 trillion this year to $1.3 trillion over the next 10 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1760,1653,7380,1654,7783,201,2326,24043,17970,538,607,827],"class_list":["post-54931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-book-review","tag-cbo","tag-cobden-centre","tag-congressional-budget-office","tag-credit-expansion","tag-deficit","tag-government-stimulus","tag-mmt","tag-modern-monetary-theory","tag-money-printing","tag-pandemic","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54931"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54932,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54931\/revisions\/54932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}