http://collectedworksofwarrenmosler.com/
Selected Posts
Comment: The “inventor” of modern money (MMT) @wbmosler: Federal gov does not need to tax anybody, sovereign countries issue own money.
Mosler: Tax liabilities are required to create sellers of goods and services desiring that currency in exchange thanks.
Comment: What prices are government agents setting, exactly?
Mosler: With every purchase govt. defines the value of its currency whether it knows it or not. The econ needs govt spending to comply with coercive tax liabilities. It’s about who’s pitching and who’s catching. It’s a simple case of monopoly. Elementary game theory / disparity of power.
Mosler: The MMT insight – which is literally what created it as a body of theory – is that a JG can be used as a buffer stock approach to stabilise wages. Saying the JG is not part of the theory just says that you don’t understand the theory.
Mosler: The MMT insight (and a contribution to the economic history of thought) is that tax liabilities are the cause of unemployment as defined=unemployment is a monetary phenomena caused by gov by design to hire the unemployed to provision the gov with its otherwise worthless currency.
Comment: Pitch your best short idea and in one tweet (no threads) explain exactly why you hate money.
Mosler: Monetary tax liabilities- the continuous requisite coercion that supports highly beneficial and desired collective action- instils a permanent, pervasive, fundamental insecurity of running out of tax credits (money) that brings out the worst in people.
Posts in chronological order
Mosler: The tax liability is the arm of today’s ‘invisible hand’ 😉
Comment: That’s not what MMT says. Tax has many purposes. As @RichardJMurphy would say. But financing spending is not one of them. Thus, Speaking of the need to tax to finance the NHS is hugely damaging. #MMT takes a lot from Keynes. More so than most orthodox economists today
Mosler: I say it this way: tax liabilities, and not tax revenues per se, function to create sellers of goods and services in exchange for the state’s currency, which the state can then buy.
Mosler: That is, there is a distinction between tax liabilities and tax revenues.
Comment: Former ICE Gov Dir. Tom Homan shows no respect to Rep Jayapal during a House hearing today after going over his time, shouting out, “I’m a taxpayer, you work for me!”
Mosler: More nearly correct would have been ‘I have tax liabilities, I’m working for you.’
Comment: Issue 1: Debt is a stock (a total you have at one time) and GDP is a flow (the total over a period of time). Better to compare stocks to stocks (or flows to flows). Not hard to pay off $20T of debt when US GDP totals about $4 quadrillion1 going forward.
Mosler: That debt already is the money- $ in cash+ reserves+ securities accounts, all Fed liabilities (functionally) = net financial assets of the economy= equity that supports the entire private credit structure=net money supply.
Comment: Perhaps you, or @AlanKohler could elaborate as to what happens when people lose trust in the underlying value of the infinite fiat that is issued for them to store/exchange, um, value?
Mosler: If it was about trust it would have collapsed a long time ago. It’s a tax credit needed to satisfy coercive tax liabilities.
1 Amerikar kuatrilioi bat: a number equal to 1 followed by 15 zeros.
