Give the people what they want!
UNAFFILIATED Voters:
— Rasmussen Reports (@Rasmussen_Poll) October 1, 2021
54% Against Raising Debt Ceiling
56% Oppose $3.5 Trillion Spending Bill
56% Believe Pandemic A Trojan Horse For Permanent Socialism
ALL Voters:
52% Against Raising Debt Ceiling
53% Oppose $3.5T Bill
59% Believe Pandemic A Trojan Horse For Permanent Socialism https://t.co/OEG70SEvde
16 comments:
Narrative control (read propaganda) works!
On the other hand, Rasmussen is generally the furthest to the right of the major pollers. Need to see some other results.
59% Believe Pandemic A Trojan Horse For Permanent Socialism
Looks like "the Great Reset" is a popular conspiracy theory — among this sample of the population anyway.
Rasmussen. Conservative polling service. Take their polls with a grain of salt.
All the others over sample Democrats by 5-10%…
Tom where in the Socrates playbook does it say the antithesis is “propaganda!”?
People opinion is technically correct here… deficits ARE bad they are a leakage to savings…
Ideally you want the deficit to be low… if your goal is “maximum employment”…
MMT: “if someone saves then we can’t buy all of our output”
So if the deficit (non govt savings) is very high then he can’t buy even that much more of our output…
Not ideal…
deficits ARE bad they are a leakage to savings…
As I understand it, spending creates flows in the economy that come with a multiplier. Taxes withdraw some of the injection to make room for public provisioning. Public debt is purely a monetary operation, whose only fiscal effect is in the amount of interest paid to non-government.
The amount that is "saved" is the add to the stock of net financial assets of non-government. This is net saving after zeroing out private borrowing, since the liability lies with the government.
But this is in aggregate and doesn't prevent individual holders of public debt from selling these securities, transferring the saving to someone else. Pubic debt comes in the form of negotiable securities that are traded in highly liquid markets and they also serves a prime collateral. This quite different from "war bonds" that isolated the debt from the market unless the holder was willing to take a discount and they were not traded. War bonds constituted actual saving that isolated funds for the term of the security.
Treasury securities are nothing like that, and short term securities are treated as cash equivalents. Treasuries don't withdraw funds from the private sector. Rather, they increase the amount of injection in the amount of interest paid and they are also highly liquid assets that don't inhibit spending desire of individual holders while they simultaneously need saving desire in aggregate. MMT economists make the point that owing to this, Treasuries are not like taxes in withdrawing fund to control inflation. Nor do they neutralize the amount of the injection that is not taxed back.
Tom where in the Socrates playbook does it say the antithesis is “propaganda!”?
It was called sophistry back then. There is a Platonic dialogue called The Sophist."
A sophist is one who makes a worse argument appear the better. Socrates liked to take them apart by showing their illogic.
Propaganda has become a lot more sophisticated since then owing to scientific understanding of persuasion, e.g., the role played in logical fallacies by cognitive-affective biases. Marketing and advertising is an example, and so is public relation. The media has always been susceptible to this kind of mind-manipulation, too.
Well how is the public wanting higher domestic employment (lower deficits) illogic?
MMT advocates for right-sized deficits which accommodate the non-government sector's net saving desires.
Is there only one right deficit level? No, because for one thing, MMT would establish a public option in the labor market — a federally funded job guarantee — thereby ensuring full employment across the business cycle. The deficit, then, would rise and fall with the cycle, as the job guarantee becomes a new stabilizer, automatically moving toward the “right size” in response to changes in the level of aggregate spending.
In the absence of a job guarantee, things get trickier. Leaving monetary (and exchange rate) policy aside, the government has to allow the deficit to go where it needs to go in order to accommodate the private sector’s net savings desires. If the private sector wants to spend less and save more, the public sector will need to accommodate that desire by running a bigger deficit or the economy will be pushed away from full employment. Krugman drew up the perfect schematic — based on the sector balance framework adopted by MMT — to explain all of this 10 years ago.
—Stephanie Kelton in response to Paul Krugman
Right. The deficit is a variable based on policy including spending choices and commitments (SS, Medicare, Medicaid), automatic stabilizers, tax rates, etc. in relation to economic performance, relative to spending/saving desire (liquidity preference). The deficit be can policy outcome and not be a policy target, e.g, a balanced budget as a fancied good.
According to MMT, deficits can be either "good" or "bad." A good deficit results from achieving policy objectives, e.g., full employment and price stability. A bad deficit is the result of not achieving policy objectives, often owing to ill-conceived austerity to achieve "fiscal responsibility."
With a good deficit, the deficit is what it is based on functional finance. It doesn't matter.
A bad deficit is often the result of setting a target and missing it because fiscal policy is ill-conceived owing to wrong emphasis, usually on "sound finance" and the "Treasury view."
There is more to it, of course, but this the elevator speech.
So much for full employment...
Still not addressing the fact that the public’s belief that lower deficits would result in closer to ideal outcomes for domestic economy…
This is not propaganda or illogic…. They have the correct technical instincts for lower deficits than present…
And I’ll tell you what’s going to happen once we clear the pandemic and the current supply constraints due to covid policies are corrected the deficit is going to fall and it’s going to be a much improved domestic economy…
So then you guys are going to tell them they are wrong and should want higher deficits…. Meanwhile we will be booming with perhaps a zero deficit…
You guys are trying to do this via your Socrates and it doesn’t work…
Empirical outcomes are going to conflict with your Socratic thesis for continued higher deficits…
I would poll them about a federal job guarantee...
The public doesn't give a shit about the deficit, yet they keep asking the same goddamn questions.
Matt Franko,
And I’ll tell you what’s going to happen once we clear the pandemic and the current supply constraints due to covid policies are corrected the deficit is going to fall and it’s going to be a much improved domestic economy…
Many people got through the pandemic by draining their savings. These people are going to want to earn without spending, so they can rebuild their savings. Keynes' Paradox of Thrift kicks in and the economy will contract without government deficits.
46 million Americans wiped out their emergency savings during the pandemic — How to turn it all around in 2021
As Americans struggle to make ends meet during the coronavirus pandemic, many are dipping into their savings and in some cases, even depleting their retirement accounts. According to a CNBC + Acorns Invest In You savings survey, conducted by SurveyMonkey, some 14 percent of Americans—or 46 million people—say they’ve wiped out their emergency savings since the start of the pandemic.
Worse yet, these people won't be able to rebuild their saving without government deficits.
The paradox of thrift (or paradox of saving) is a paradox of economics. The paradox states that an increase in autonomous saving leads to a decrease in aggregate demand and thus a decrease in gross output which will in turn lower total saving. The paradox is, narrowly speaking, that total saving may fall because of individuals' attempts to increase their saving, and, broadly speaking, that increase in saving may be harmful to an economy.
Also, this:
S = I + (G - T) + (X - M)
Absent the external sector, the increased desire to save for the reason given above can only be satisfied by increased investment or government deficit spending. Without deficit spending, consumption falls, the capacity utilization rate falls also, and investment follows consumption downwards, and with it, saving. The effort to save, in the aggregate, defeats itself.
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