Australian Politics Forum - Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)

Welcome, Guest. Please Login or Register

Forum rules, Recent posts (with text), RSS, Search options, Browse all uploaded images
Home, Articles, Green Tax Shift, Evolution,

Australian Politics Forum › General Discussion › General Board › Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)

‹ Previous Topic | Next Topic ›

Pages: 1 ... 70 71 72

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) (Read 100913 times)

thegreatdivide

Gold Member

Offline

Australian Politics 

Posts: 13127
Gender: male

Re: Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
Reply #1065 - Feb 8^th, 2025 at 9:43am

Frank wrote on Feb 7^th, 2025 at 3:17pm:

Quote:

Errors abound in dummy Sowell's statement, caused by his ignorance of the nature of fiat currencies (and ignorance of the nature of money in general).

"A $100 bill would buy less in 1998 than a $20 bill in 1960". This means that anyone who kept his money in a safe over those years would have lost 80% of it value".

1. Few people are brainless enough to do that, rather they invest their savings (or borrow) in productive enterprises; and those many people who are living paycheck to paycheck certainly can't do it anyway.

Why DOES money lose 80% of its value?

Money doesn't lose its "value" in terms of current purchasing power, if the average wage continues to buy the same basket of goods over time.

Quote:

"Dummy Sowell" says brainless stuffed parrot with no more learning than a Cert III in Goggling. You are ludicrous ( but we have known that).

Refuted above; and, eg, the US dollar still enables the Pentagon to purchase goods and services required to maintain its capacity/status as the world's most powerful military - so much for "devaluation" of the US dollar.

IP Logged

Frank

Gold Member

Online

Australian Politics

Posts: 47699
Gender: male

Re: Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
Reply #1066 - Feb 8^th, 2025 at 9:48am

thegreatdivide wrote on Feb 8^th, 2025 at 9:43am:

Frank wrote on Feb 7^th, 2025 at 3:17pm:

Quote:

Why DOES money lose 80% of its value?

Money doesn't lose its "value"

You are a mindless idiot.

Estragon: I can’t go on like this.
Vladimir: That’s what you think.

IP Logged

thegreatdivide

Gold Member

Offline

Australian Politics 

Posts: 13127
Gender: male

Re: Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
Reply #1067 - Feb 8^th, 2025 at 10:04am

Why the "dismal science" is no longer attracting young minds as a field of study at tertiary level.

https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=62349

The decline of economics education at our universities

A short history

In 1994, I was elected by my colleagues to be the next Head of Department of Economics at the University of Newcastle.

It was still a time when ‘democracy’ ruled in Australian university departments and I was actually the last elected head at that university.

The tides of neoliberalism and corporatisation were already beginning and during my term, consultants recommended that the university cease elections for all the senior positions (HOD, Deans, President of Senate, etc) and instead move to appointments only.

Obviously, this reduced the voice that we had as the appointments were crafted to maintain control of the new KPI-driven agenda.
But those days were the beginning of a long decline for economics education in the university system.

Up to that time (1994), the federal government had allocated funding to States to fund capital and recurrent expenditure in universities on a triennial basis.

The public universities in Australia are legislative creations of the states but it is the federal government money that kept them afloat.

The triennial funding system gave universities some security and continuity and departments were able to make pitches on the basis of the so-called ‘establishment’ (which carried a number of appointments).

The link between student load and the establishment was hazy and the latter was driven more by the political skills of the university admin and then within each institutions by the skills of the faculty bosses (Deans and HODs).
When I became HOD, the Economics Department was the largest (in staffing) in the university and the staff had enjoyed a lot of security for some years.

Things changed dramatically around that time though.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the federal government created a unified tertiary system – merging the universities, institutes of technology and colleges of advanced education.

It was brutal shift and caused massive disruption to the internal structures of the universities.

Overnight, we had university academics with PhDs who had built research careers forced to work with CAE staff who were really school teachers – no advanced degrees, no research background and used to long holidays over Summer (which is the time the active researchers write up their competitive research grant applications).

The mergers created ‘business schools’ and downgraded the position of economics – which was seen as a service course for these new ‘business degrees’, rather than the core academic discipline of the traditional faculties.
...

A large body of research in social sciences (around the world) has demonstrated that standard economics programs at our universities breed people with sociopathological tendencies who elevate greed above empathy.

There is clearly some self-selection bias because the studies have never really isolated the impacts of the teaching programs from the tendencies of the students going into the programs.

One 2005 study that was published in the journal Human Relations – Personal Value Priorities of Economists – found that:

1. Economics students exhibited less altruism and more self-interest in their “first week of their freshman year”.

2. That is, “differences between students of economics and students from other disciplines were already apparent before students were exposed to training in economics”.

3. After one year of study these differences were maintained and stable.

4. By the final year of study, the emphasis on “achievement, power, hedonism” were sustained and economic students valuation of “benevolence”, which we might think of as being empathy towards others, had declined significantly.

In their 1993 article – Does Studying Economics Inhibit Cooperation? – economist Robert Frank and psychologists Thomas Gilovich and Dennis Regan summarised the extant literature and conducted a series of their own experiments to explore whether there are significant differences between “economists and noneconomists” in relation to whether they exhibit sociopathological tendencies.

They conclude that:

1. “that economists are more likely than others to free-ride”.

2. “economics training may inhibit cooperation …”

3. And, interestingly, that “the ultimate victims of noncooperative behavior may be the very people who practice it”.

4. And students in economics classes are more likely to lie when confronted with experiments about generosity – that is, claiming to be more generous than they were.

Further, an LSE Centre for Economic Performance Discussion Paper (No. 1938, July 2023) – Are the upwardly mobile more left-wing? – found that:

1. “that higher own status and higher-status parents independently produce Conservative voters.”

2. Higher own status leads to “opposition to redistribution”.

3. “individuals with the most Right-wing attitudes (and votes) are then those with high social status whose parents were also of high social status.”

The problem then is that not only are the number of economists emerging from universities declining but there is also a growing concentration among males from privileged backgrounds that are liable to exhibit the sorts of tendencies noted above.

Think about that in the context of designing progressive government policy

(Entire article at link)

IP Logged

thegreatdivide

Gold Member

Offline

Australian Politics 

Posts: 13127
Gender: male

Re: Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
Reply #1068 - Feb 10^th, 2025 at 9:40am

Speaking of the egregious outcomes of the 'dismal science' practitioners, who claim there is no alternative (TINA) to their obsolete neoclassical dogma:

Driven by self-interest - but now social cohesion is increasingly at stake, as home ownership rates are falling (due to government abandoning public housing over decades), and retirees who don't own their own home are plunged into poverty due to unafordable rents in the private housing market, the mainstreamers are forced to intervene in the private market.

The solution from these mainstream clowns?

Government should increase rent assistance for pensioners - money paid for by the public which goes straight into the pockets of landlords treating housing as a private wealth-creation vehicle.

Deplorable.

Meanwhile the public reject 'The Greens' policies to build more public housing, because that will require higher taxes - politically toxic, as shown in the Prahran by-election on the weekend.

Pathetic.

The Greens could actually make themselves useful in Parliaments by educating politicians and the public that currency-issuing governments don't need taxes in order to fund public housing, governments need access to the resources held by (and available to) the nation's building industry.

But The Greens - like all politicians - are more interested in the silly political circus which is a useless competition in elections among adversarial parties, a competition forced on them by mainstream 'dismal science' economists.

IP Logged

thegreatdivide

Gold Member

Offline

Australian Politics 

Posts: 13127
Gender: male

Re: Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
Reply #1069 - Feb 10^th, 2025 at 3:14pm

In defense of Trump's tariffs - but confusion abounds because global trade is incredibly complicated, in a global economy with shifting fortunes and technological advances in different nations (as noted in the comments section following the article).

https://www.ft.com/content/3c95a4cd-2dcb-46d8-8cf6-606ab5e28c51

Tariffs are a misunderstood tool

Debate over trade strategy has become an ideological litmus test in which few are willing to acknowledge nuance.

Michael Pettis.

An interesting article exposing the intellectual/academic disputation among practitioners of 'the dismal science'.

.........

(Pettis is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace - a fact which points to the reason why classical economics is a failure: international peace is still a pipe-dream....despite being a necessity to achieve good national and global governance).

« Last Edit: Feb 10^th, 2025 at 3:19pm by thegreatdivide »

IP Logged

thegreatdivide

Gold Member

Offline

Australian Politics 

Posts: 13127
Gender: male

Re: Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
Reply #1070 - Yesterday at 9:15am

More on the egregious outcomes for governments of neoclassical 'dismal science' practictioners and educational institutions:

https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=62352

Economics as politics and philosophy rather than some independent science

Last week, I wrote about – The decline of economics education at our universities (February 6, 2025). This decline has coincided and been driven by an attempt by economists to separate the discipline from its roots as part of the political debate, which includes philosophical views about humanity and nature. In her 1962 book – Economic Philosophy – Joan Robinson wrote that economics “would never have been developed except in the hope of throwing light upon questions of policy. But policy means nothing unless there is an authority to carry it out, and authorities are national” (p.117). Which places government and its capacities at the centre of the venture. Trying to sterilise the ideology and politics from the discipline, which is effectively what the New Keynesian era has tried to do, fails. The most obvious failure has been the promotion of the myth of central bank independence. A recent article in the UK Guardian (February 9, 2025) – You may not like Trump, but his power grab for the economic levers is right. Liberals, take note – is interesting because it represents a break in the tradition of economics journalism that has been sucked into the ‘independence’ myth by the economics profession.

...

Mainstream commentators ofcourse choose to remain blithely ignorant, repeating the "balanced budget" mythology as some sort of 'natural law' of economics ad nauseam.

IP Logged

thegreatdivide

Gold Member

Offline

Australian Politics 

Posts: 13127
Gender: male

Re: Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
Reply #1071 - Yesterday at 4:01pm

The Guardian

New Zealand government loses ground in polls as economic concerns grow

New Zealand’s National-led coalition government is losing support among voters, new polling shows, amid frustrations over the economy and deepening concern the country is heading in the wrong direction.

Meanwhile, the parliamentary left bloc has taken a narrow lead for the third poll in a row, enough that the opposition would be able to form a government were an election held today.

.......

Proving that all governments, left, right or centre - are soon on the nose with the electorate, because, misled by orthodox neoclassical/neoliberal economists, mainstream politicians can no longer serve the interests of ordinary people.

Hence the rise of the populist right....let's see what they can do..... Huh

Note: plenty of cracks already appearing in Trump's reign...eg:

('Raw Story')

Disappointing': Deep red Trump-voting county begs president to reconsider decision

Trump's recent announcement directing the Treasury Department to stop minting new pennies aims to save taxpayers money — but may inadvertently cost workers in a county that overwhelmingly voted for him.

Trump made the announcement over the weekend, citing the cost to produce each penny, which costs about 3.7 pennies to create. The U.S. Mint reported losing more than $85 million in the last fiscal year that ended in September on the roughly 3 billion pennies it produced.

"For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents. This is so wasteful!" Trump wrote Sunday night on his Truth Social platform. "I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies."

While some conservatives cheered the move, Tennessee workers who supply the U.S. Mint with the blank discs stamped into pennies weren't as thrilled, according to The Greenville Sun.

Jobs could be lost at Artazn LLC, based in Tusculum, Greene County, in eastern Tennessee, which is politically conservative and Republican.

Greene County, where Tusculum is located, voted for Trump in the 2020 election by close to 80 percent. All surrounding counties also voted for him. In November, he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris with roughly 83 percent of the vote.

Jeff Taylor, president and CEO of the Greene County Partnership, urged the president on social media to reconsider.

“Save the penny. For those that do not know, every penny starts in Greene County. Save jobs in Greene County!” wrote Taylor, according to the report.

Taylor has not heard from the company, according to the report.

“It’s disappointing to see President Trump make a statement of directive like that because these are American jobs,” he said.

...

Seeking to save pennies in his search for $2 trillion (to reduce the deficit, as per the mainstream fiction), Trump is alienating workers who voted for him.

The 'honeymoon' might be short-lived...

« Last Edit: Yesterday at 4:53pm by thegreatdivide »

IP Logged

thegreatdivide

Gold Member

Offline

Australian Politics 

Posts: 13127
Gender: male

Re: Modern Monetary Theory (MMT)
Reply #1072 - Today at 10:01am

Ellen Brown's version of government "money printing" to grow the economy.

https://ellenbrown.com/2025/02/11/quantitative-easing-with-chinese-characteristi...

Informative article, concluding with these two paragraphs:

Growing Our Way Out of Debt

Rather than trying to kneecap our competitors with sanctions and tariffs, we can grow our way to prosperity by turning on the engines of production. Far more can be achieved through cooperation than through economic warfare. DeepSeek set the tone with its free, open source model. Rather than a heavily guarded secret, its source code is freely available to be shared and built upon by entrepreneurs around the world.

We can pull off our own economic miracle, funded with newly issued dollars backed by the full faith and credit of the government and the people. Contrary to popular belief, “full faith and credit” is valuable collateral, something even Bitcoin and gold do not have. It means the currency will be accepted everywhere – not just at the bank or the coin dealer’s but at the grocer’s and the gas station. If the government directs newly created dollars into new goods and services, supply will grow along with demand and the currency should retain its value. The government can print, pay for workers and materials, and produce its way into an economic renaissance.

IP Logged

Pages: 1 ... 70 71 72

‹ Previous Topic | Next Topic ›

« Forum

‹ Board

Top of this page