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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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IMO non of this is conventional economics and is widely seems as false to experts.

  1. It’s not just “descriptive/logic of how things work”. It had some truthiness in a few limited situations. An extremely well-diversified (like America dominant in all core industries) economy that can issue it’s own currency and if need be completely self-sufficient (commodity producer/tech dominant/manufacturing powerhouse). When the economy is operating significantly below capacity 2007-2020 and cam increase demand without causing higher inflation MMT appears truthy. One could argue simple monetarily policies would do the same.

  2. There is zero evidence COVID did policies (which were MMT or traditional Keynesian) did not result in a long-term permenent change in the price level. By costs-push I assume you are referring to supply chain disruptions as causing inflation. Under a supply-chain ONLY model of COVID inflation we would have seen the price level increase by 10% with lower output levels followed by the price level returning to pre-COVID levels while output returned to pre-COVID levels. At this point the evidence is overwhelming that a large portion of COVID inflation was due to excessive stimulus.

  3. I have no idea what your argentina remarks refer to. Printing less money and higher rates will 100% cause inflation to disappear. The issue is Argentina continues to print more base money to pay their bills. If Argentina quit printing money they would not have inflation.