{"id":44381,"date":"2019-02-21T09:40:56","date_gmt":"2019-02-21T09:40:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=44381"},"modified":"2019-02-21T09:40:56","modified_gmt":"2019-02-21T09:40:56","slug":"what-the-staggers-is-missing-on-modern-monetary-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2019\/02\/21\/what-the-staggers-is-missing-on-modern-monetary-theory\/","title":{"rendered":"What the Staggers is missing on modern monetary theory"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Howard Reed has a knack for getting to the core of critical economic issues. He has written this as a comment on the blog this morning, referring to the very poor <a href=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2019\/02\/21\/the-new-statesman-making-up-stories-about-modern-monetary-theory\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">New Statesman article<\/a> on modern monetary theory:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The elephant in the room \u2014 which isn\u2019t mentioned at all in the article \u2014 is that MMT explodes false constraints on govt spending based on the \u201chandbag economics\u201d which post-2010 UK governments have claimed to be operating under (i.e. \u201cthe govt MUST live within its means\u201d, \u201cthe deficit on current account MUST be balanced within 5 years\u201d, etc.) Of course, while Osborne, Hammond etc have been saying \u201cwe need to balance the budget\u201d they\u2019ve simultaneously been giving huge amounts of money away to middle-to-high income taxpayers and corporations through income tax and corp tax cuts, so it was always garbage even on its own terms. But it provides a convenient cover for cutting public spending. MMT has the great merit that it exposes all this \u201cbalanced budget\u201d stuff for the eyewash that it is, and I wish the article had been upfront about that. There is (somewhere) a full employment resource constraint and that\u2019s where inflation, etc. comes in, but that\u2019s quite different from the fake constraints that the UK Government\u2019s been peddling for the last decade<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I agree.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Howard Reed has a knack for getting to the core of critical economic issues. He has written this as a comment on the blog this<br \/><a class=\"moretag\" href=\"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2019\/02\/21\/what-the-staggers-is-missing-on-modern-monetary-theory\/\"><em> Read the full article&#8230;<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-modern-monetary-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44381\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}