Many social media commentators that have become interested in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) regularly cite sections of the article written by businessman and former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Beardsley Ruml – Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete – which appeared in the January 1946 edition of the American Affairs journal. The article was actually a speech that he made “before the American Bar Association during the last year of the war”. Some claim that the content provides an early underpinning for Chartalism, upon with MMT is, in part, derived. I disagree. If you read his work carefully, rather than selectively quoting convenient sentences, and, that work includes his more substantial book that was published in 1945 and from which the article cited above was derived, you would get no MMT succour. He was basically lobbying for zero corporate taxation and he expressed rather orthodox views about fiscal policy at the time, which are very non-MMT in substance.…
Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Reading Beardsley Ruml carefullyBill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteWell, I first heard of Ruml in an aticle posted by Warren Mosler some years back, and in it he mentions that Ruml is talking about the merits of corporate taxes, but...
ReplyDelete... it is his discussion about how the function of taxes changed after the nation exited the gold standard that make this a must read.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/taxes-for-revenue-are-obs_b_542134
“ He was basically lobbying for zero corporate taxation”
ReplyDeleteBill towing the current Democrat line for higher taxes…