At least one person on the right doesn't want to drink out of the toilet next month.
#Eakinomics: Why the debt limit should be raised via @djheakin http://t.co/rMVQsJtg0F pic.twitter.com/VcntsVNRsD
— AmericanAction Forum (@AAF) October 5, 2015#Eakinomics: Why the debt limit should be raised via @djheakin http://t.co/rMVQsJtg0F pic.twitter.com/VcntsVNRsD
— AmericanAction Forum (@AAF) October 5, 2015
7 comments:
Why not remove it? It makes no sense, is a gold standard relic.
Even if you are out of paradigm ("we are running out of money!"), the debt should be a function of the GDP, and measured at current dollar prices, not those of the last century.
It's stupid. But maybe this will force some rethinking of the current dominant 'money scarcity' mindset.
They do call gold the "yellow metal" .....
Here:
"Alchemists spent much time trying to extract gold from urine..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urine
Cant even make it up....
I suggest we stop using the phrase "debt limit" and refer to the "money supply limit".
The central problem is that the average dimwit politician (along with Rogoff and Reinhart) think that government debt is comparable to a household debt, and needs to be repaid. Plus as Martin Wolf pointed out, government debt at low rates of interest is the same as money.
I.e. simply removing the word "debt" from the phrase "national debt" or "government debt" would solve a lot of problems.
Agreed with Ralph, I've been saying the same for a while, we must remove the word 'debt' from anything related to government financial assets (be them bonds or other forms of IOU). A lot of problems come from this and it's relation to language.
'Debt' is a too loaded term.
It looks like standard Judeo-Christian OT/NT views creating cognitive biases...
OT: borrow > default > forgive
NT: issue > redeem
Borrow: Israel was a tenant with liabilities
Default: Sin (breach liabilities)
Forgive: Make offering and go back to being justified tenant
repeat...
Issue: Grace (Unmerited favor of God) "For there is one God, the Father, out of Whom all is..." 1 Cor 8:6
Redeem: salvation (keeping) of God "we rely on the living God, Who is the Saviour of all mankind...." 1 Tim 4:10
We're definitely in the extreme minority view currently ...
For the umptrillionth time, this oft-heard idea of removing the word "debt" is the opposite of MMT. Such thinking was a major cause of the decline & fall of Keynesian economics & the postwar era. Dan Kervick retrod this path into a coal pit when he progressively misunderstood MMT more & more & then abandoned it. But at least Dan understood that behind the question of "What is Money?" is the question of "What is debt?" It is not the word "debt" but the avoidance of the word "debt", weird ideas that it is different from "liability", that "credit" & "asset" have any difference in meaning except from perspective, that is and was the problem.
What should be retired - or restricted to MMT 101 is the ultimately misleading slogan that household debt and government debt are mystically incomparable. As often in any subject the first thing to do in XXX 102 is to understand how what you were taught in XXX 101 is wrong. For the core of MMT is Mitchell-Innes, that money is credit/debt, that government debt is comparable to private debt, that they are the same damn "thing". The point is not to dogmatically & wrongly asserting incommensurability, but to do the comparison, do the accounting slowly & correctly. Two who did this comparison quite clearly - aside of course from Keynes or Minsky, where it is everywhere implicit - are Lerner & Forstater's teacher Robert Heilbroner. The clear thinking today on this comes from the UMKC school & anybody named Geoffrey.
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