The Biggest Deficit You’ve Never Heard Of — Dean Baker

America has a deficit problem. But the country’s biggest deficit isn’t the federal budget deficit. It’s the deficit in public investment.

The public investment deficit is the gap between what we should be investing in our future — on infrastructure, education, and basic research — and the relatively little we are investing.

Increasing public investment needs to be a major goal of the Biden administration.

Public investment is similar to private investment in that we invest today because of the payoff in the future. The difference is public investment pays off for all of us, for America.

Those funds are being "invested" in the military instead of R&D, infrastructure, health care, and education, that is, unproductively rather than productively for society.

MMT proponents already emphasize productive public investment. But we really need to address this misallocation of funding, which is unnecessary for national defense. Rather, it is in furtherance of neo-imperialism and neocolonialism and it is based on a neoliberal model economically and a neoconservative model politically. 

This is not because the funding is needed to pay for productive public investment but rather to reduce the commitment of real resources to that which is not productive for society. 

And, then, there are the geopolitical and moral considerations in addition to the economic. Arguably these are even more significant than the economic.

Not MMT, but a good background argument for adopting MMT in policy formulation.

Beat the Press
The Biggest Deficit You’ve Never Heard Of
Dean Baker | Co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C