#102 Kairin Van Sweeden & Cameron Archibald: Scotland’s Job Guarantee – An Employer Of Last Resort
May 26, 2021
Patricia and Christian talk to Kairin Van Sweeden & Cameron Archibald of Modern Money Scotland about their Job Guarantee proposal for an independent Scotland.
[Transcript] Opening monologue for Episode 102 – Kairin Van Sweeden & Cameron Archibald: Scotland’s Job Guarantee – An Employer Of Last Resort
(https://www.patreon.com/posts/51672599)
At the beginning there, you heard Cameron Archibald and Kairin Van Sweeden of Modern Money Scotland and in a moment we’re going to be talking to them about their proposal for a Job Guarantee for an independent Scotland.
If this is your first time hearing about MMT, you might want listen to our first three episodes for an introduction, but if you want to dive in here, the context is that if you live in a country with a floating exchange rate currency, like say the UK, the US, Japan, Canada, or Australia, your government is unequivocally the source of your national currency. And this means that your government is fully responsible for the level of spending power in your economy.
Every year they spend some money into the economy and over that same period of time, they tax some money out of the economy. When they do the accounting at the end of that period, if it turns out that they’ve spent more into the economy than they’ve taxed out of the economy, we say that they’ve run a deficit, but that deficit, those pounds, dollars or yen they’ve spent into the economy represent net financial assets for you and me, aka the private sector.
Put simply, it’s our money. And we talk a little in this conversation about how we need to understand that in order to be able to fight for progressive policies and how misleading and damaging it is when pundits and politicians characterise government deficits as being somehow immoral, rather than just a piece of accounting.
By accounting identity, every sector’s deficit represents another sector’s surplus, and the government’s deficit is the non-government’s surplus. When the government runs a surplus, it’s you and me, the non-government, that has to go into deficit to offset it. Anyone with a credit card knows that the private sector can run deficits, but we also know, that for us, default is possible, and even probable, if we keep having to go into debt to offset government surpluses. On the other hand, as the issuer of currency, your government can never involuntarily default on any future promise to pay any amount of its own currency, because it issues that currency without operational limit.
So if there’s not enough spending power in the economy to give a job and an income to everybody who wants one, that’s solely to do with government policy. This is what we mean when we say that unemployment is a policy choice, and a bad one that can be fixed with the stroke of a pen. And so, in order to have all economic policy options on the table, a nation that aims to have self-determination needs to control its own currency, and the conversation that follows is all about that.
In the show notes for this episode, among other resources, I’ve linked to Kairin and Cameron’s Job Guarantee proposal, and a few of our other episodes to do with Scottish independence, and to some other things that came up in the conversation,(…)
