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Can We Make Money Work For Us? with L. Randall Wray https://youtube.com/live/urmJP9MZApY?feature=share
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Can We Make Money Work For Us? with L. Randall Wray
Grumbine: Can we have too much money? Wray: Yes, we surely can. Usually, our problem is that there’s too much bank money
Bideoa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urmJP9MZApY
Wray: Yes, we surely can. Usually, our problem is that there’s too much bank money, and the usual consequence is a financial crisis.
Obviously, Steve and his guest are talking about the nation, not their own wallets. In this episode, he welcomes L. Randall Wray to Macro N Cheese for the eighth time to talk about Randy’s new book, “Making Money Work for Us: How MMT Can Save America,” which will be released in America in November.
Our listeners know they can count on Randy to explain MMT principles clearly without drowning us in a sea of wonkiness, but, also, without oversimplifying the subject. Consider the above exchange… and then this:
Wray: Money cannot cause inflation. I can state that unequivocally.
MMT understands that those two statements are not contradictory. Randy talks about the banks financing too much speculative activity that goes bad, usually resulting in a financial crisis. Extensive government spending – when it’s targeted, as in a job guarantee – does not cause a crisis, does not cause inflation. He contrasts this to the wrong kind of government spending, and describes how it is inflationary (cough, UBI).
Steve and Randy go through the other questions that MMT is uniquely able to answer in a way that isn’t disconnected from our real-world observations. What is money and how is it created? What does it mean when you say “taxes drive money”? They discuss deficits and debt – and why it is that the few times the US repaid part of the national debt, it led to a depression, except under Bill Clinton, when it led to the great financial crisis.
You’ll want to listen to this episode just for the discussion of the Fed and the banks. The CEO’s should all be locked up.
L. Randall Wray is a Professor of Economics at Bard College and Senior Scholar at the Levy Economics Institute.
Transkipzioa:
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foreign [Music]
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s are very famous for saying there’s no such thing as a free lunch well my argument is both of these things are not
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just false they’re grossly false that free lunches are bound and that by
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avoiding taking free lunches we live way way below our means
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[Music] foreign [Music]
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the U.S government doesn’t spend by issuing currency anymore
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it spins by having the Fed Credit Bank Reserves
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[Music] what I have said is that this campaign
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is not just about electing a president it is about making a political
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revolution foreign
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and borrowing from China
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is the program so critical it’s worth borrowing money from China to pay for it and if not I’ll get rid of it stop lying
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[Music]
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now let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse all together here’s another episode of macro and cheese with your
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host Steve grumbine alright and this is Steve with macaron cheese I have a great
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podcast I think it’ll be a great podcast lined up with none other than Randy Ray
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or L Randall Ray and Randy is a expert on mmt’s a professor of Economics at
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Bard College and a senior scholar at the levy economics Institute author of many
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books and the guy who wrote probably the most important one which was the primer
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to Modern money which you could have found in blog posts on New Economic
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perspectives however he has written many new books including the one we’re about
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to discuss which is making money work for us how mmt can save America now this
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has an American flavor and for our International guests you already know a lot of this stuff is very similar so
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Randy thank you so much for joining me today sir yeah thanks for having me back
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it is genuinely a pleasure I really appreciate the way you frame things and
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I really appreciate you writing this book I was able to read the pdf version of it and it’s just going to be an
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excellent resource especially for activists that need that next level of push I
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think you did a great job of capturing the stuff most of us already knew and adding a lot of nice features specific
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to the United States what caused you to decide to write this
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book you’ve written so much
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she kind of funny yeah there was a period back when the
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new economic perspectives blog was very active I was writing a lot on there and Stephanie Kelton and I had been reading
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George lackoff on Framing and so I wrote a short series of blogs on framing
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and then one of the Money Networks you probably remember which one I don’t
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put those together into very small PDF book so I had that kicking around and then
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one of my former students from Levy SK Dornan
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happens to be a very good artist and so we started out with a cartoon book
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and I used parts of that but then I expanded it to go through all the main
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issues that you need to really understand what mmt is about and we put that together and send it on
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to polity press and the problem was that there were too
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many words for in a cartoon book and so I took the words
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and I added to it knowing that there would be no pictures
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just words and I made it a little bit more rigorous than what was originally
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planned and so I have put that out as a separate
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book and the cartoon book is waiting in the wings and we’ll be out soon after this
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one and it has very few words so it will make similar arguments
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but with fewer words it’s really designed even for public schools
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and also activists who don’t want to sit down and read a 160 page
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look it’s not yeah this is short this is a relatively
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short book but we wanted something much shorter that someone could sit down and go through in one hour easily with
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pictures that help to explain the main ideas so anyway this is the wordy version and then the picture version
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will be out later well it was incredibly good because not only does it provide some really great
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quotes and some really great framing I like the way you frame things you make
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them very simple you typically don’t assume a lot of knowledge either when you make statements
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they’re usually able to be put in front of someone who maybe hasn’t had a deep understanding of the stuff and I really
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appreciate that too by the way because there’s a lot of times even myself included just as an activist where you
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just make a lot of assumptions and the things you say are assuming the person has prior knowledge that most don’t have
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even people that have gone through economics classes in college
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this is really powerful and you start out with what is money and before I get
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there I want to say your reference to husky she put together a great cartoon about the start of money and talked
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about when a sovereign king would issue money and it’s just one of his great infographics I think that was back when
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they were doing the Minsky’s and I think it turned economic questions but it is one of the best little cartoons I had no
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idea she did it either until I shared it one time without attribution because it is fantastic I still use it to this day
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you start out with what is money what is money Randy yeah I do start off in the
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typical way it’s done in economics textbooks and also the way that people
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think about it money is what money does sort of a functional approach oh I can
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use money for this I can use money for that and so on and I say but that
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doesn’t really get to the nature of money what is money really and I think I
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had the analogy of it’s like defining a human as something that sits on the couch and munches ships while watching a
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football game that doesn’t really get to the nature humans do do that but humans
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are more than that so anyway then I go through examples we take a coin or if we
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take a green paper dollar bill in the U.S a pound note in Britain
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what is that thing well it is an IOU of
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the government what is your bank check well you’re ordering the bank to make a
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payment for you it’s your IOU technically it’s the banks I owe you but
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you owe the bank and the bank is going to debit your account and so we go through all the different kinds of
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monies that people have used back through time and they all share that
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characteristic they’re all the IOU of the issuer and they are the credit of the holder so
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it’s kind of funny to think of it this way but if you’re holding a dollar bill
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the government is the debtor and you are the Creditor most people never thought
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that they were the Creditor of the US government but that’s exactly what they are if they’re holding the government’s
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IOU no kidding we didn’t get to ask them for their credit worthiness did we it didn’t
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much matter we took their credit anyway yes and then we go through why is it
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that we will accept it without any reservation at all there might be some crazy people who wouldn’t take a dollar
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bill but you don’t find those people very often so why is it that they will do that and what is it that makes you
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want to hold that and so go through the typical mmt point is taxes Drive money
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and then we can generalize that too you will accept a bank IOU
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that is bank money because you know that the bank will accept it from you in payment to the bank so you can repay
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your bank loan by using bank money and I use Eric to Moines great example
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of pizza coupons to get even further now no one would want to call a coupon for a free pizza
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money but it is an IOU it’s the IOU of the pizza joint you can
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present that and receive a pizza back so what does the pizza joint owe you a
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pizza if you hold a coupon and then we go through when you return an IOU to the
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issuer whether that’s a dollar bill returned to the US government or a bank
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IOU return to the bank or a Pizza coupon return to Joe’s Pizza what do they do
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with it obviously they throw it away they burn it they tear it up they shred it
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because when your IOU is returned to you we call that Redemption and you are no
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longer in debt Joe’s Pizza no longer owes you a pizza once you have submitted
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that coupon and they have given you a pizza in return
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it’s funny I used to run sabaro’s the Italian Eatery and we had all these little coupons that
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they would give us to hand out and I remember standing at the island in the
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turn lane as you come into the mall because sabara’s got a mall footprint we
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would have the coupons from the headquarters and then I would go out there in a goofy outfit because I’m
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flamboyant like that and I would hand out these coupons to cars at the stoplight and then when they would come
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into the building I would fry up a little bit of extra garlic so that they would smell garlic and they’d come
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naturally over to our counter they would have those coupons in hand and they would cash those coupons in and when we
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received those coupons what are we going to do with them well in our case the next day went back out to the island and
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reused those coupons but we didn’t have to we could have deleted them we could have ripped them up we could have tossed
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them it didn’t mean anything they were there to serve a purpose and the piece of paper wasn’t the purpose the piece of
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paper was access to the thing of value which was a reduced price on a slice of
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pizza which we as the debtor I guess in this case owed them 50 cents off their
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slice or whatever it was is that a similar analogy we’re talking about yeah
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when the cube coupon comes back to you or when a dollar bill goes back to Uncle Sam it’s not an asset you are no longer
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in debt but you would never count that as an asset the pizza joint could choose to reissue
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the coupon and then it’s in debt again or it can choose to toss it into the
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fire in the pizza oven either one because it is just a piece of paper when
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it’s sitting in the pizza joint or if it’s sitting at the Federal Reserve Bank
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it’s just paper so you can tear it up you can shred it you can put it in little baggies and give it to the people
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who take the tour of the FED which they do as a souvenir because it’s just paper if it’s cost
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effective to reissue the coupon if it’s still in good shape sure you can do that and then you’re in debt
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within the framework we have a Federated approach to money tiers of money of
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sorts we know the federal government being the currency issuer who that liability belongs to that liability is
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theirs they’re issuing that tax credit however at the state level they don’t get to create tax credits they need
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those tax credits to spend they’re only deleted when they’ve done their job at the federal level and that’s to received
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back as a tax can you explain the kind of relationship between the different levels of government in the United
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States the currency issuer currency users and how that plays out between the
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two yeah the U.S Constitution says that only Congress can issue the currency and so
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in the beginning that was a responsibility of the U.S treasury that had been granted by Congress to the U.S
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treasury in 1913 we created the Fed so the FED is our Central Bank we’re pretty
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unusual other countries had created central banks back at the end of the
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17th century so we were a relative latecomer to Central Banking but at the
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time that we created the central bank both the treasury and the FED issued
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paper notes eventually the treasury stopped issuing them all together and they’re sort of collectors items now
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and the FED took over the sole responsibility for issuing the currency
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but it only does this to accommodate the demand for currency
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so the U.S government doesn’t spend by issuing currency anymore
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it spans by having the Fed Credit Bank
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Reserves so we could go through that in more detail later sure so really most of
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the federal government spending well all of the federal government spending now takes the form of credits
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of Bank Reserves by the Fed anyway getting back to the Constitution
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so our 50 states are not allowed to issue currency there has been talk occasionally of
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issuing tax credits that could be used to pay taxes especially in crises
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when states have large budget deficits for example when Arnold Schwarzenegger
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was governor of California there were some experimentation of this but this is
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pretty unusual behavior for the most part our states use the national
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currency they are not currency issuers they are currency users in our
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Republican form of government very good you go into some different
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quotes and you were kind enough to pass some of these on and I just want to fit them in
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and we just touched on this is anyone can create money the problem lies in
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getting it accepted who is the one that that quote came from yep well this was Hyman Minsky’s
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saying I heard him say it many times in class I was one of his students
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and what he was getting at was that anyone can issue in the United States a
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dollar denominated IOU you might also try to issue a euro-denominated IOU or a
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pound-denominated IOU but in the US mostly you’re going to issue dollar denominated ious the problem is to get
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someone to accept it so I can write I owe you five dollars and if you will
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accept it I have created a monetary IOU in the book I go through these examples
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and talk about what is it that will make your ious more acceptable but then I
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conclude probably we wouldn’t want to call Steve’s IOU money we would want to
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call it a money denominated IOU it’s gonna have a pretty narrow range of
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circulation among your friends and your family
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whereas a bank IOU I think we want to call that money that one is going to
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have very wide circulation for a couple of reasons one is that Uncle Sam stands
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behind the banks ious with FDIC insurance if the bank defaulted and for
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some reason refused to accept its own IOU back Uncle Sam will make sure you
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get paid in some other form of money we also have the FED that guarantees the
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liquidity of bank ious which means how fast can you get cash if you decide you
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don’t want to hold the banks IOU and with a bank you can basically just go to the ATM machine and get cash out
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and then finally another reason why Bank i o user widely accepted is because so
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many of us owe Banks banks are the most important financial
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institutions that we have in the United States in which we hold deposits and
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make payments through those deposits held at Banks and so we know we have to make lots of
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payments to and through banks so we’re willing to accept the bank ious for
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example your paycheck is going to be a bank IOU and you’re willing to accept
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that so we want to keep it pretty narrow our definition of money even though anybody
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can ride I owe you five bucks okay I get it
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question you go into talking about where money comes from which we’ve just talked
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about but I think that there’s an abstraction above that I’ve heard Warren talk about money being a tax credit we
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mention it as a unit of account I know you said that because the
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Constitution the Congress has Authority and that we’ve passed on the money
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creation from the treasury to the Federal Reserve in 1913 but in general
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though money comes from anyone that can write an IOU but we’re dealing with the currency
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being a form of law this is a patented legal construct that
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the United States government owns in other words it can’t borrow its own IOU from someone else it’s the creator of as
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many ious as it wants is that a fair statement can you explain that
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okay first the main point that mmt makes is that
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the need to pay taxes or other obligations to the issuer of the currency
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ensures that there will be a demand for it so it absolutely guarantees there
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will be a demand for dollars if you have to pay taxes in dollars so that is what
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drives the currency on top of that we can add things like a system of laws and
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enforceable contracts and say that we will enforce debts in court payable in
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US Dollars that will also add an additional demand for dollars
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we often call this the Fiat money promise and it says right on the dollar
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bill this is good for payment of all debts public and private so that’s the legal fee at nature of money but not all
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currencies have had that and we know that it’s not always in force it’s
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difficult to enforce payment in dollars you can try to buy drinks on the
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airplane with a five dollar bill and they’ll say no we don’t accept that here
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so nap who’s sort of the father of the state money approach said that Fiat
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money is just a Pious hope but taxes or a different matter
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altogether that’s more than a hope payment of taxes in dollars is
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enforceable about the borrowing your own IOU this
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would be a nonsensical operation the accounting makes no sense
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I write some ious I owe you five bucks and I owe you four bucks and I owe you three bucks and I say
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I really need to borrow I better try to borrow my ious from the people I have
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already written ious two that would be a senseless operation if you want to go
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further into that you just write another IOU it would make no sense for the federal
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government to borrow its ious back in order to spend more it just issues more
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ious okay so you go into chapter three and
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you talk about can we have too much money and I would suggest going back to the
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very first mmt conference in 2017 Steve larchuck talked about a money famine
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so we know that we can have not enough money you’re asking the question can we have
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too much money and you have the sound money gold bugs talking about the
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cantalon effect can we have too much money yes we surely can
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usually our problem is that there’s too much bank money
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and the usual consequence is a financial crisis
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so what has happened is that banks have financed
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too much speculative activity that goes bad
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and so the result of too much private bank money is usually a financial crisis
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I could conceive of banks financing too much real activity that is actually
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trying to produce too much stuff trying to purchase too much stuff so the banks
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are making loans to finance spending and production and we get beyond the
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capacity of our economy to produce real output to meet those demands I could
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conceive that that could possibly happen I think it’s extremely rare usually
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they’re not financing enough of the real activity their problem is they finance too much
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Financial speculation and then that leads to some kind of a financial bust
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so that’s the usual consequence of banks creating too much could the government create too much yes
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it can if the government starts spending too much
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especially if it’s not targeted spending and especially if it is not spending on
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a fixed price which I’ll come back to in just a second so that it’s willing to
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pay whatever the price that is necessary to buy all that it wants
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it could cause prices to rise and we would call that inflation so in other
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words the problem of too much government money creation to finance government spending
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is more likely to be inflation rather than financial instability
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now what’s this fixed price floating price idea let’s use the job guarantee which is a
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favorite policy proposal of mmt let’s say that the government says we’re going
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to pay 15 an hour and we will hire anybody who is willing
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to work at 15 an hour that’s a fixed price it’s very difficult to see that that
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could ever lead to too much spending by the government because
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only the unemployed are going to show up people who are willing to work for
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fifteen dollars an hour and once you’ve exhausted that supply of people willing
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to take jobs you don’t spend any more so spending on a fixed price policy is
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not going to be inflationary if Harvey said we’re going to hire 25
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million people and we don’t care what wage we have to pay we’re going to reach that bar
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that could be inflationary unless you happen to have 25 million people who are
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willing to work at the existing going wage you’re probably going to cause some wage inflation which could lead to some
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price inflation so it makes a difference what sort of a price scheme the government adopts and
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also what the government is trying to buy let’s say we’re going to do the green New Deal
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and we want to transition to solar energy and the government says we will spare no
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cost we’re going to completely convert to solar energy within the next year and a half
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you could see how that could probably lead to some inflation of the prices of
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various things that go into producing solar panels because we have resource
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constraints so it also depends on what you are buying if you’re targeting your spending
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two areas where you have excess capacity of both Factory potential and also labor
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Supply then Target where you have ample capacity you’re not going to be
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inflationary if you instead have a generalized increase in all kinds of spending you
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could possibly generate some inflation pressure this is probably the most challenging
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aspect that I think mmt is hitting in public spaces is this concept of
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printing money there’s too much money chasing too few goods Mosler would tell us that that’s
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completely wrong is it really a matter of the quantity of money or the amount of spending on
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specific things that are exceeding the real resources underlying its purpose in
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other words it’s not about money from the economy it’s driving inflation is that really the issue or is it the
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actual number of dollars in circulation that has any bearing whatsoever on
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inflation yeah money cannot cause inflation right I can state that
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unequivocally I give an example in the book so the
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government prints up a gazillion dollars puts it on a spaceship and sends it to Mars
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no inflation so the creation of the money doesn’t cause any inflation
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then musk flies to Mars brings the gazillion back and starts
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spending like a whirling dervish inflation so you blame inflation on spending not
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on money spending can cause inflation when we had the first round of coveted relief checks
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sent out there was no inflation why because people were very scared of the
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future we had locked down you couldn’t go out to restaurants and so on and so what people did was they paid down bills
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a lot of those were overdue bills because people had lost their wages and then they saved the rest there was no
29:29
inflation the second round covert went on a lot
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longer than anyone thought that it would we had a supply chain problems all over
29:40
the world we had large parts of China in complete lockdown and we rely a lot on
29:47
consumer goods from China and people felt more comfortable about
29:52
spending the second round of checks and given all the supply constraints
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these sellers were able to raise the price and so we got some inflation
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the problem was not the money because when people received the first round of checks which was approximately the same
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amount it caused no inflation the second one did result in some inflation now I
30:19
want to emphasize this was not a demand side problem it was a supply side problem with a huge collapse on the
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supply side when people started spending in some cases and there was a lot of
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price gouging markups and profits reach record levels
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as sellers took advantage of the recovery of demand that was boosted by
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the checks so spending can cause inflation money cannot
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when we’re talking to a politician media Outlet the frequent statement is simply
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they printed money therefore we have inflation we can pretty much put that
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one to bed right now the issue comes down to that we spent past the productive capacity in a given
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area and now we have a combination of gouging and simply supply side shortages
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because people are bidding for those scarce resources the price goes up it’s not an issue of the money per se
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it’s an issue of a scarcity of real resource yeah mmt prefers targeted spending I
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don’t think any mmt proponents were out there telling presidents Trump and Biden
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you ought to mail checks to everybody whether they need the money or not it was a bad idea targeted spending would
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have been much better we should have restored the wages of everyone who had
31:54
lost their job or could not go to work that would have made more sense we could
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have put people to work helping us to fight the pandemic there
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was a lot that people could have done that would have been useful and by
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targeting the spending it would have been much easier to match the resources that we have
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with the amount that we are spending if you just mail out checks to everyone
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you don’t have control over that the question that most folks have at
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this time the unrivaled Monopoly power of the establishment with the media they have a
32:37
narrative and penetrating that requires far more resources than we have here and
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I think that even with all the noble efforts of activists and academics that
32:48
have been exposed and now radicalized to some extent with this knowledge
32:54
it’s a real challenge because everywhere you go the wrong framing is being
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reinforced I guess the next question is the national debt deficits which I believe
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one of the quotes that you have in there is there’s no such thing as deficit
33:12
spending spending happens the exact same way regardless and that the deficit is
33:17
recorded after can you explain that and then we’re going to roll into balanced budgets yeah
33:26
so everyone thinks that government faces a choice of spending tax revenue or
33:34
borrowing from Savers or printing up money the safest is supposed to be spend the
33:40
tax revenue because then the government is not going into debt and it’s not going to cause
33:45
inflation because you’re giving up your income so that the government can spend
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so we’re not really adding much net spending to the economy so that is
33:56
supposed to be the safe sustainable way to finance government spending
34:01
in a pinch it might be okay for the government to borrow a bit so you issue
34:06
some debt like in recessions or in a health pandemic that we went through it
34:13
might be okay to borrow temporarily and then you need to offset that by running a surplus that is spending less than
34:21
your tax revenue and then pay back that debt okay and then the final one is printing money and oh that’s the worst
34:28
one by far because that means inflation because money causes inflation the reality is there is no choice all
34:35
government spending takes exactly the same form as I was saying before the FED will
34:43
credit the reserves of a private bank and the private bank will credit the
34:48
deposit account of the recipient of the government’s spending whether the government is buying from a contractor
34:54
or making a Social Security payment to a retiree this is the way all government
35:00
spending occurs there is no other way since 1913 when we created the Fed all
35:08
government spending takes exactly that form taxing just reverses it so when you
35:13
pay your taxes your deposit account at your bank is debited and your bank’s reserves are debited
35:20
where does the money go it’s just a debit it’s just a balance
35:25
sheet operation it’s an electronic debit of your account it doesn’t go anywhere
35:31
there’s nothing for the government to spend you can’t spend negatives you know
35:36
it’s just a negative subtraction from your account when the government is spending over the
35:43
course of the year we can make a projection and say well we think the government is going to have a
35:49
deficit of one trillion dollars this year we do not know we will only know
35:55
after the fiscal year is over and we tally up all of the government spending
36:02
and tally up all of the tax revenue and subtract and if we get a negative number
36:08
we say oh there was a deficit the spending was greater than the tax
36:14
revenue will total it up at the end of the year and in fact we will revise that
36:20
several times over the course of the next couple years as they look more carefully at all of the accounts and
36:27
tally it all up and they’ll say oh well we were off a bit okay it was only 800
36:32
billion the point is that as we move through the
36:38
year on any given day during any given week over any given month we don’t know
36:44
what the difference between the spending and the tax revenue is we total it up at
36:50
the end of the year and we’ve adopted procedures that have
36:55
been explored by mmt this gets more complicated but work by people like Eric
37:01
Des Moines and Scott fullwiler and Stephanie Bell before she became Kelton
37:07
more than 20 years ago started this analysis to see
37:12
what are the special operations that the fed and the treasury work out to make
37:19
sure that treasury checks never bounce and so on and so they’re complex but
37:27
more or less it will be true that at the end of the year if we total up all the
37:34
spending and the tax revenue and we find that the deficit total is a trillion
37:40
dollars there will be more or less about a trillion dollars of government bonds
37:46
that will have been sold into the economy and all of those bonds have to be held
37:52
by somebody as Financial wealth and the government’s deficit
37:59
will equal the surplus of the non-government
38:05
sectors households firms and foreigners and that
38:10
Surplus will be held in the form of the government’s debt
38:15
that one trillion dollars so what budget deficits do
38:22
is they add spending into the economy that spending gets accumulated as saving
38:29
by the non-government sector in the form of the bonds that the government issues
38:36
so the government debt is our wealth when the government runs a deficit of a
38:42
trillion and adds 1 trillion of debt into the economy that trillion of debt
38:49
is our financial wealth and it’s held in the safest form on planet Earth which is
38:55
U.S government bonds
39:05
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39:56
I shall tell bye one of the other key policy zero interest rate policy zurp
40:04
the idea of not selling bonds anymore I’ve listened to Old recordings of you
40:11
talking about how the issuance of bonds is a gold standard anachronism that
40:18
doesn’t do what it once did it doesn’t serve the purpose and that a sovereign currency issuing Nation on a Fiat
40:25
currency no longer needs to I think Beardsley Rumble in 46 said were removed
40:30
from the markets now the control of the markets basically the Bond vigilantes
40:35
have no power over us anymore is what I read that to say and yet they do whether
40:41
it be just because we accept them to have that power or not is another story but talk to me about that what is zurp
40:48
why does it matter and what would that do to the framework you just laid out okay if we go back
40:56
before the global financial crisis the Fed was actually prohibited
41:03
from paying interest on Reserves the FED wanted to pay interest on reserves and Banks wanted the FED to pay
41:10
interest on reserves because when Banks held reserves they got no return on it
41:18
it’s like having a savings account that gets a zero interest rate
41:23
and we don’t have to feel too awfully sorry for the biggest banks but in the
41:30
U.S we had 17 000 Banks not long ago we’re down to about 4 000 now but we
41:38
have lots of small Banks and they would hold reserves and not earn any interest on them and so they wanted the FED to
41:47
pay interest on Reserves Congress finally allowed the FED to start paying
41:52
interest on reserves in the global financial crisis as sort of a Prelude to
41:57
doing quantitative easing which was going to take all the bonds out of bank portfolios and substitute
42:06
those with Reserves now if the FED had done that and paid
42:11
zero Anderson reserves you would have Banks giving up bonds that might have been paying four percent and then
42:17
holding an equivalent amount in reserves that paid zero you’re going to greatly reduce the interest earnings of banks
42:24
which means greatly reduce their profitability and the banks were already in trouble because of the global
42:30
financial crisis because they had made all sorts of bad loans so it was sort of a precondition to
42:38
running quantitative easing to have the FED start paying interests so we do pay interest on reserves now
42:45
and those are a perfect substitute for short-term government debt
42:53
the advantage is that the FED is directly determining what that interest rate is going to be what interest rate
43:00
is going to pay on Reserves and we don’t have to sell any bonds and we never have to worry about an attack
43:09
by Bond vigilantes and the FED can still use interest rate
43:15
policy in the manner that it is using now which I have always opposed
43:23
because the FED is biased against labor and the FED doesn’t usually want to come
43:30
right out and say it but if you read the transcripts from their meetings you know that they discuss this
43:35
that the way that they perceive interest rate policy working is by causing unemployment so what they’re trying to
43:42
do now is cause unemployment in order to fight inflation so I think this is a big problem so
43:49
anyway many people have argued that we should eliminate Bond sales but also
43:55
mandate that the fed’s interest rate target should be zero this is what zerp
44:00
is zero interest rate policy so we get rid of the bonds we get rid of the Bond vigilantes and we prevent the
44:08
fed from doing what it’s doing right now so we would move to zero interest rate policy and Banks would just have to hold
44:16
reserves that would accumulate with the government’s spending in excess
44:24
of tax revenue aha fair enough which brings me to this great circle which is
44:30
balances balance I know the great sectoral balances graphs that we get from the St Louis fed
44:37
where you’re spending mirrors debt what do you mean by balance is balance
44:43
well the strange thing is people talk about a government deficit is an imbalance
44:51
a trade deficit is an imbalance but we know at the aggregate level
44:58
that the balances have to balance that’s why we use this term balance
45:06
imbalance is not possible if I’m a creditor you are my debtor
45:14
we must balance your IOU is my asset
45:19
that’s why I’m your creditor but your IOU is your debt that’s why you’re the
45:26
debtor so looking at only one side of that makes no sense at all yeah it has
45:32
to balance for every creditor there has to be a debtor for every debtor there has to be a creditor so if Uncle Sam is
45:39
a debtor it makes no sense to say oh that’s an imbalance because it has to be
45:47
balanced someone has to be the Creditor so anyway that’s the idea
45:54
the credits and debits must balance that is looking at the debt and wealth
46:00
but it’s also true of the incomes so you spend more than your income that’s why you’re a debtor I spend less than my
46:09
income that’s why I’m the Creditor I get to accumulate wealth in the form of your
46:14
ious because I’m Thrifty I spend less of my income
46:20
and you increase your indebtedness because you’re a spend Thrift you spend
46:26
more than your income it has to balance now in the case of you
46:33
you have a limited lifespan unfortunately very true
46:39
and at some point I’m going to start worrying about your death and I want to
46:45
be paid before you die I don’t want you to die and then just
46:50
default on all that you owe me so when we’re talking about private
46:56
debts we have to think about eventually being repaid
47:01
I’m perfectly happy with you just pay me interest for a long time but I also know
47:08
there is some endpoint out there so I want to be repaid at some point in time
47:14
if we think about Uncle Sam he doesn’t have a finite lifespan
47:19
now no government has ever lasted forever but we always like to pretend like our government will
47:26
so the truth is that Uncle Sam never has to repay his debts because he’s a going
47:34
concern with no finite lifespan and if Uncle Sam does die
47:41
our nation collapses worrying about his debt is going to be the least of our
47:46
concerns so we have this fiction that yeah he’s going to go on forever and his ious are
47:53
perfectly safe and so he doesn’t have to repay those we’re perfectly happy to hold his debts forever
48:00
and in fact Uncle Sam only repaid his debts one time in U.S history that was
48:06
1837 that was President Andrew Jackson and we went into our first Great
48:11
Depression that year when Uncle Sam did repay all of his debts and he never did
48:16
it again we’ve had very short periods of time where Uncle Sam repaid a small part
48:23
of his debts and those were always followed by depressions too except for Clinton’s short period of time where
48:31
Uncle Sam repaid some of the debt and then he went into the global financial crisis so there’s a very interesting
48:39
correlation there it’s not good for us when Uncle Sam repays his debt we hope
48:44
he learned his lesson and will never try again because we don’t want another great depression or Global financial
48:50
crisis and there’s no reason why you should so we can continue with Uncle Sam always
48:59
increasing the outstanding quantity of debt which means we are always increasing our outstanding Financial
49:06
wealth which is claims on Uncle Sam and this can go on forever it’s
49:11
perfectly sustainable amazing and I guess that brings me to a
49:18
question you brought up even though I don’t know it’s related but I think it is and that is the Federal Reserve acts
49:26
at behest of Congress but a lot of people will say that the Federal Reserve
49:32
backstop the financial Corruption of the global financial crisis
49:38
and then people say I was quantitative easing that did it what are we talking about when we say these sorts of things
49:45
they’re said by lay people trying to make sense of a crazy world within the frame of balances balance and
49:52
understanding that Congress has the Constitutional authority to create money what is the fed’s role in this what do
49:58
they do with QE and why does that matter to us okay so QE was a policy of buying
50:08
massive quantities of bonds
50:13
a big part of that was buying government bonds my argument would be that had virtually
50:20
no impact whatsoever on the economy as slightly reduced bank profitability that’s all that it did it substituted
50:27
interest earning Reserves for interest earning government bonds
50:33
so from the point of view of did that help the economy recover did it help financial markets recover the answer is
50:41
no not at all it’s a smoke screen
50:47
it’s The Wizard of Oz with smoke and mirrors doing nothing at all
50:53
a large part of the fed’s purchases though were mortgage-backed securities
50:59
and this was to try to restore the market in mortgage-backed Securities
51:04
which had collapsed because so many of those securities
51:09
were of very questionable value and World War zero because the mortgage
51:16
loans were fraudulent on the part of the lenders not on the part of the borrowers they were fraudulent loans they could
51:23
never be repaid and the underlying mortgages weren’t worth anything
51:28
the homeowners defaulted on them now we don’t know exactly what kinds of
51:36
mortgages the FED bought the FED claimed that these were all government insured mortgages so Fannie
51:44
Mae Freddie Mac guaranteed mortgages so that in a way Uncle Sam was already on
51:49
the hook because the mortgages are guaranteed which means if the homeowner borrower
51:55
doesn’t repay Uncle Sam has to pay this could be true
52:01
I’m a bit doubtful but we don’t know the answer to that so it is possible that part of QE may
52:10
have played some kind of a bailout role but if the treasury was already on the
52:17
hook you could say Okay so the FED bailed it out rather than treasury bailing it out big deal
52:24
what was far more important far more questionable and lots of it
52:30
actually illegal is that the FED lent and purchased assets through other
52:38
facilities not quantitative easing there was a whole alphabet soup of special
52:45
facilities that allowed the FED to buy Bad Assets and to make loans to try to
52:52
save insolvent fraudulent financial institutions
52:57
we did a study at the levy Institute funded by the Ford Foundation Andy
53:03
felkerson and Nicola Matthews did most of the work for me on this and found
53:09
that the FED spent and lent 29 trillion dollars through this alphabet soup this
53:16
dwarfs all of QE was far more directly involved in bailing out financial
53:23
institution that’s the real Scandal it’s not the QE it is the alphabet soup of
53:30
stuff that they did and if you want to read a more easier exposition of this
53:35
Matt taibi’s work on the Real Housewives of Wall Street
53:41
he looks at one of these programs in which the Fed was making non-recourse loans that means if the bar
53:49
couldn’t make a payment they didn’t have to so it’s non-recourse to the house wives
53:56
of the CEOs of Wall Street Banks to buy Bad Assets and if the assets
54:03
didn’t turn around don’t worry you don’t have to repay the Fed this sort of stuff is what they were
54:10
doing lots of it was illegal by some estimates maybe 40 percent
54:16
of all of that activity was actually illegal according to the Federal Reserve Act the fed’s not allowed to do this
54:23
sort of stuff and they got away with it wow so this is in essence the thing that
54:31
enabled and empowered groups like Countrywide and bear Stearns
54:37
to basically get away with the Looting of people’s properties during that time
54:43
period all the Elite control fraud that guys like Bill black brought out is that a fair statement yep and of course Bill
54:51
black was my colleague at the UMKC and he was very well known for exposing what
54:58
had gone on in the saving loan crisis and wrote the book the best way to rob a
55:03
bank is to own one and he pointed out in the Savings and Loan crisis 1 000 top
55:09
CEOs and so on top management of the thrifts went to prison and in the case of this Fiasco which is
55:18
much much bigger because the banks are much bigger than thrifts
55:24
we had banks that had assets of three to four trillion dollars individually so
55:30
they’re much much bigger and the scale of their frauds was much much bigger
55:35
than what the thrifts had done and none of those top people went to prison bill
55:42
and I wrote about a vice president of Bank of America who actually got convicted of fraud she’s one of the very
55:48
few but she didn’t have to serve time foreign
55:54
I know that was a little off script there but thank you Randy for that I appreciate so the next chapter which
56:00
we’ve kind of talked about is life is full of trade-offs and I hear Stephanie frequently talking about offsets World
56:09
War II and the selling of war bonds and having to delay purchasing power by
56:15
selling war bonds to extract some of the aggregate demand from the economy since
56:21
all the production was going to the war machine are we talking about that or something entirely different
56:27
well economists generally think there’s all these trade-offs and we’re always making
56:33
decisions and if we decide that the government is going to spend more
56:39
and that we’re going to have more public type goods and services that means we
56:44
must have less private production and provision of private goods and services
56:51
there’s supposed to be this trade-off and economists are very famous for saying there’s no such thing as a free
56:57
lunch well my argument is both of these things are not just false they’re
57:02
grossly false that pre-lunch is abound and that by avoiding taking free lunches
57:12
we live way way below our means and that depresses the path of the
57:20
growth of our economy which means that we get even less in the future so what do I mean by free lunches if you
57:28
have resources especially labor that are unemployed you’ve got a free lunch you
57:35
can put it to work and by keeping people unemployed
57:41
not only are they and their families suffering a loss of wages
57:49
but Society itself suffers there are individual costs of being
57:56
unemployed that go Way Beyond the lost wages and there are social costs that go
58:02
Way Beyond The Lost potential output that we could have had because
58:08
unemployment has severe social and psychological consequences
58:14
so what we need to do is try to put those resources to work and that will give a free lunch
58:21
I know years back JD alt who was a frequent writer over at New Economic
58:27
perspectives wrote the oppressive free lunch because Paul Ryan had come out and told this tale about how a child went to
58:35
school and was on the free lunch program but it was so oppressive because he just wanted a brown paper bag sealed with a
58:41
kiss and a love note for Mom and they talked about how there are no free lunches this just won’t go away
58:49
this is so ingrained in the American society is there any appetite for doing
58:56
great things or are we really trapped in this oppressive cycle
59:01
well it is extremely difficult we went through this long period
59:08
in which the so-called Phillips curve which is the idea that there’s a trade-off of unemployment for inflation
59:15
was thrown in some disrepute because if you plotted
59:23
the inflation rate and the unemployment rate there was no correlation between the two
59:30
the unemployment rate went up and down the inflation rate remained very low for
59:36
a long period of time and so we were hopeful that we’d put a
59:43
stake through the heart of the Phillips group but now it’s come back the inflation rate went up and it’s not
59:51
too hard to identify what caused that things that I already talked about supply chain disruptions people couldn’t
59:58
go to work and price gouging and then OPEC and then the war in
1:00:04
Ukraine which disrupted energy and wheat and so on
1:00:10
but the FED is convinced that the problem is that too many people have jobs it became too easy to get a job so
1:00:19
we need to make it hard to get a job we need to increase the unemployment rate
1:00:25
we need to take jobs away from people so it has come back and it was the inflation scare
1:00:32
and misunderstanding about what is causing inflation that is allowed Powell the head of the
1:00:40
FED to resurrect volcker and we’re gonna do it again
1:00:47
the problem in the early 80s also was not that unemployment was too low
1:00:52
in fact we had stagflation which was high unemployment and high inflation at
1:00:58
the same time and volcker said well oh we can solve that problem by controlling the money
1:01:03
supply which was the monetarist idea that you referred to earlier it’s a money problem
1:01:09
too much money so we’re going to take the money out of the economy they couldn’t do it they never reduced the
1:01:14
rate of growth of money supply what they did is they raised the interstate above 20 percent and that was the lowest interest rate
1:01:21
that was the overnight bank rate so they lose it above 20 percent caused a
1:01:27
financial crisis that was the saving loan crisis and eventually inflation moderated which
1:01:34
it would have done even without the policy because it was driven by food and oil prices and the shelter component of
1:01:42
the CPI which is exactly what is causing the inflation now is largely the food
1:01:47
and oil and shelter component plus these anomalies that have to do with Supply
1:01:54
chains um so it’s not a demand side problem now it
1:01:59
wasn’t a demand side problem back then but the way we’re going to solve inflation is by crushing Demand by
1:02:06
causing lots of unemployment so that people will have income that is too low to go out and buy stuff
1:02:12
so it is back and it’s very very troubling that after this almost two decade period
1:02:21
where it seemed like we had left all of that behind it came back no bad idea in
1:02:28
economics really ever dies they always come back
1:02:36
yeah you don’t say it would be great if somebody remembered earning the Old
1:02:42
Colonial money and realized money wasn’t permanent I think the idea that gold is
1:02:48
money is why they can’t fathom money is not permanent and so that combination
1:02:53
seems to be hard to break free from the commodity folks to the Fiat folks which
1:02:59
brings us to the two concepts together chapter six and seven of your book
1:03:05
the mmt alternative framework for policy and then mmtm policy and you and I have
1:03:11
spoken about how funding programs matters and how we evaluate them I
1:03:17
talked to all of you mmt developers and for the most part you guys sing a
1:03:22
similar tune everybody’s got a slightly different way of saying things but talk to me about the framework for
1:03:28
policy and then ultimately mmtm policy
1:03:33
well the framework that I’m pushing and I think all of us agree on this is that
1:03:40
we can have political constraints to spending and we see that so we’ve been fighting over the green New Deal
1:03:47
and there are political constraints on what Biden was able to push through
1:03:52
unfortunately we can have resource constraints
1:03:58
so that would limit how rapidly we could phase in a Bernie Sanders style
1:04:06
green New Deal go completely carbon neutral
1:04:12
when Yavin I started writing on this we were aiming for 2030 but
1:04:18
unfortunately we have wasted five years now because we had four years of trump
1:04:23
and now 2030 is not going to be possible
1:04:29
anyway there would be resource constraints on how fast we can do this
1:04:34
we got to build a national electric grid and so on it’s going to take some resources to do that we’ve got to get
1:04:41
off fossil fuels and then there are technical know-how
1:04:47
constraints the scientists who are developing the
1:04:52
technology that we will need for the green New Deal seem to believe that it’s actually
1:05:00
technically feasible to go completely off fossil fuel and go to zero carbon
1:05:07
so if we phase it in slowly enough and we use the knowledge that we have it
1:05:14
looks like we can do it so the mmt argument is that Finance
1:05:20
cannot be a constraint if we have the know-how if we solve the political problems and we can find the resources
1:05:27
we can implement the green New Deal Finance can’t possibly be a constraint
1:05:32
because Finance is keystrokes it’s just credits and debits and you
1:05:38
cannot run out of those so we should be able to do this
1:05:44
align the policy makers hold the politician’s feet to the fire is really
1:05:51
all we need to do to get it through so that’s the framework whatever is
1:05:57
technically feasible is financially affordable always
1:06:04
speaking to regular people that I talk to on a daily basis they have gotten to
1:06:10
the point where they no longer believe that they have a safe and whenever they
1:06:15
try to hold politicians accountable there is a cast of well-meaning tone
1:06:20
police that say what do you want Trump and it’s always punching an activists
1:06:26
who are trying to force Congress to serve us there seems to be a power
1:06:32
Dynamic that folks inherently understand and then when they hear the mmt story
1:06:38
they struggle because they’re saying what this makes all the sense in the world but when I marry it up with my
1:06:44
ability to either vote for a candidate that I want or actually supporting a
1:06:50
candidate with a policy that I want and so they often will discount the
1:06:56
information we say the information is so important because it radicalizes us
1:07:02
enough to understand that we’ve been denied basic services for a long time and if ever there was an opportunity for
1:07:09
people to rise up and force Congress to take action it’s now
1:07:15
I know that you’re an economist I know you’re not a political strategist but I do Wonder as you’re considering these
1:07:22
things what might your message be to folks that are trying to make these
1:07:27
things happen how do we get past that as an mmt Community trying to grow knowledge
1:07:33
what do you suggest any thoughts is not all hopeless
1:07:39
I know you have read and listened to Congressman Yarmouth
1:07:44
he gets it absolutely and he has made as clear a statement as any mmt person ever
1:07:52
has he says we can afford it because we determine how much Federal money is in
1:07:58
the system and the federal government is not like any user of the currency it’s not like a household or a local
1:08:04
government or any business we issue our own currency we can spend enough to meet
1:08:10
the demands and needs of the people the only constraints are the resource
1:08:15
constraint and then the possibility of inflation so we need to be careful
1:08:21
he understands all of this and I think I talked about this last time but when I
1:08:27
met with them when I testified he told me that most of the Democrats on the budget committee which is the committee
1:08:34
that puts forward the budget and allocates the various spending programs
1:08:40
to different committees he said most of the Democrats understand this and he is trying to make it safe
1:08:49
for other elected representatives to say things like this in public AOC will say
1:08:56
things like this in public she’s making it safe for others to say it in public too so I don’t think that it is hopeless
1:09:05
we have to remember most politicians are not leaders they’re followers and it really does depend on their
1:09:14
potential voters that they are supposed to be representing to push them to do what is right and the notion that
1:09:23
we Face climate catastrophe is accepted by most sane people in America
1:09:33
we have more Insanity than probably any other Rich developed Democratic
1:09:40
capitalist country but outside them this is not controversial anymore we Face
1:09:47
catastrophe if we don’t act swiftly and in the Senate we have two Democrats
1:09:56
who hold things up we’ll see how the next election goes there’s some hopeful talk that things
1:10:04
might go better than they usually do in the midterms and possibly there could be more support
1:10:11
for renew deal type programs after the next election
1:10:16
I don’t know I don’t do politics I know you don’t and I’m not a partisan person
1:10:23
anyway so I don’t put all my hope in one party or the other we can
1:10:29
continue to push and to recognize when people like Yarmouth and AOC and
1:10:38
Bernie Sanders most of the time when they get it right give them credit
1:10:43
and give them support for what they’re trying to do fair enough so mmt and policy there’s a
1:10:51
view that mmt is purely a lens and then we come out with a job guarantee and
1:10:57
everybody’s talked about this but this is a key thing I think people sometimes struggle with and it’s possible that we
1:11:04
forget that just because something is possible with an mmt lens doesn’t mean it’s politically going to happen talk to
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me about mmtm policy and the job guarantee okay well the reason why we focus so
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much on saying that most of mmt is descriptive is because
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so many people in the media and some politicians who talk about mmt
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talk about it as if mmt is something you implement and oh let’s try mmt in the
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health pandemic or Japan tried mmt
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so we want to make it clear that we’re describing the way the Sovereign governments spend
1:11:52
and mmt has accurately described that while almost everyone else gets it wrong
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so we’re trying to explain how governments actually spend and what
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monetary policy is actually about and the role played by central banks in
1:12:13
financing government spending so that’s the descriptive part and that gets us to
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the point where you will recognize well hold it if that’s the way it’s all done
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it’s just accounting records then affordability is never the question
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so that’s the first hump and that is a very big hump to get over once you understand how government
1:12:36
actually spins you realize government cannot run out of money so there’s not an affordability constraint
1:12:42
then we move on to well okay now given that what should the government spend on
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and our argument is that government ought to Target its spending don’t mail
1:12:54
a check to everybody don’t Implement a basic income guarantee which is sort of like mailing a check to
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everybody let’s focus on targeted spending and
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let’s use a price rule because that will establish the value of the currency the
1:13:13
price the government is willing to pay and what’s the most important resource we have in the economy it has to be
1:13:20
human labor that’s our most important resource not just because we need the
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physical activity and the mental activity and The Innovation and all of that of human beings most of our work
1:13:32
now is with our brains not with our hands but also because it underlies our
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whole social system in providing incomes to support families
1:13:44
so we want to ensure that our most important resource is fully utilized up
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to how much work people want to do so that leads us to the conclusion we
1:13:58
need full employment well how can we get full employment it should not be controversial at all to
1:14:05
say that it is not the business of Private Business to ensure we’re at full
1:14:10
employment the business of private businesses to make a profit now we can put constraints on them and say
1:14:16
you also have to pay attention to what you’re doing to the environment and we have to respect human rights and all
1:14:23
that stuff of course we can’t just say profit maximization is your only goal which is what Milton
1:14:30
Friedman used to say so we’re going to put some constraints on you but still we’re not going to say you
1:14:36
ought to hire someone if it’s going to reduce your profitability terms are only going to employed the
1:14:43
number of workers they think they need to produce the amount of output they think they can sell in a profit in other
1:14:48
words they only hire if they think it’s going to lead to profit and we’ve
1:14:54
organized our economy largely around capitalism and that’s what it’s all
1:14:59
about and this system only reaches near to
1:15:06
full employment in major expansions we may get close
1:15:13
at the peak of a business cycle a robust business cycle expansion and then we
1:15:18
fall away because it’s always followed by a recession so we spend most of our
1:15:24
time far away from Full Employment that’s reality I don’t believe this is
1:15:29
contestable all you have to do is look at the data this is the way things work
1:15:34
so what do we do the rest of the time when we’re not at a business cycle Peak it has to be the government there is
1:15:42
just no other way to maintain continuously over the course of a
1:15:48
business cycle something that approximates full employment it has to be the government the government doesn’t
1:15:54
face an affordability constraint and it doesn’t face a profit constraint so it’s the government’s responsibility and it
1:16:03
can always afford it so that’s why we focus on the job guarantee to ensure we
1:16:09
keep our most important resource fully employed and we use a fixed price policy
1:16:16
the fixed wage we say fifteen dollars an hour we probably should be increasing
1:16:22
that for our proposal now maybe it’s twenty dollars an hour maybe it’s twenty five dollars an hour
1:16:28
but we will then provide as many jobs as people want to take at that wage that
1:16:35
cannot be inflationary so this solves our potential inflation problem of too
1:16:40
much government spending because the government will stop spending more when people stop showing up to accept a new
1:16:46
job it can’t be inflationary it will maintain the value of the currency that’s why it’s our most important
1:16:53
policy and why all mmt proponents accept the job guarantee
1:16:59
well stated So Randy when does this book come out I guess someone told me October in the
1:17:08
UK and November in the U.S I sort of jumped the gun I didn’t realize that it
1:17:13
wasn’t out November 2022 is what it says in the book it’s 224 pages long you can order
1:17:20
it in advance now I strongly recommend getting this this is I think going to be
1:17:26
important I know it’ll be important for us as an activist community and we want
1:17:31
to make sure we get it into as many hands as we can but Randy what else you working on I know you always have
1:17:37
co-authoring with other former students do you have any other stuff coming out here
1:17:43
we have several papers on inflation at the levy Institute if anyone wants to look at our views as to what caused it
1:17:51
and I think yeva and I will do another one with new information that’s coming
1:17:56
in and to react to what the FED is doing I’m going to most likely put out a third
1:18:04
edition of the primer which you mentioned earlier let’s say new and improved in the sense
1:18:09
that things have changed quite a bit in euroland
1:18:15
so I will be redoing that part explaining the Euro and
1:18:22
why things are not quite as bad as they were in 2015.
1:18:29
so there have been changes there actually 2012 was the first edition 2012. it’s improved a lot since 2012. so
1:18:37
that one will probably be my next project after the Illustrated guide to
1:18:43
mmt comes up very good I know Dirk ants had put some stuff out about how the requirements on
1:18:51
deficits have dropped out there that people are just able to spend now and I’m sure there’s much more to it than
1:18:56
that yeah I’ll look forward to reading your paper on it in the update of course when you
1:19:01
put the book out so Randy thank you so much for joining me with us today I really appreciate this and we do
1:19:09
something called RP live a real progressives live which is semi-monthly where we have someone come on and talk
1:19:16
to our audience and take a little bit of q a from people I would love to be able to bring you in and maybe even do a book
1:19:22
club for this as well if you’re interested in participating and joining us we definitely are down for it yeah
1:19:29
that sounds good fantastic with that friends I’m Steve grumbine with Mac Brown cheese my guests
1:19:35
Randy Ray we are out of here
1:19:44
macro and cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy descriptive writing by Virginia Cox and promotional artwork by Andy
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Kennedy macaron cheese is publicly funded by our real Progressive patreon
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account if you would like to donate tobacco and cheese please visit patreon.com real progressives
1:20:03
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