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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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It seems like your deep dive was not into primary MMT sources, but rather critiques from the outside? Your post sounds like you were just following the attempted dismissal from like a Sumner/Rowe/Noah Smith, at least from when I was following along 10 years ago.

If you were reading anything from the main MMTers themselves, you would surely have seen them counter these dismissals a hundred times. You would surely have seen that the main thing they talk about is about how fiscal policy already manages the macro system with automatic stabilizers for the last 80+ years, not requiring congress to manually fiddle with tax rates all the time to respond to demand and inflation. And you would have heard Wray say in every book or every talk that we could certainly get some demand-pull inflation before true full employment if simply pumping fiscal stimulus via general spending, which is a demonstrated lesson from the 60s keynesians. If those were 2 of your own 3 conclusions from an actual deep dive, and you weren't just re-presenting a critique you heard, I don't really know what to say.

I do agree that a full discussion is a bit pointless and frustrating. In general I'm perfectly content with how economists, central bankers, policymakers, all the way on down to average internet commenters, have shifted a decent amount in the last 15 years toward the MMT explanations. From what I see there's a lot less of the really goofy misconceptions (we're borrowing from china, we're broke, central bankers are wizards, interest rates control the price level, banks are lending out reserves, QE is printing money, etc). So to the extent that the dismissal of MMT is "we already knew that" or "I don't agree with their progressive policy prescriptions", it works for me.

You would surely have seen that the main thing they talk about is about how fiscal policy already manages the macro system with automatic stabilizers for the last 80+ years, not requiring congress to manually fiddle with tax rates all the time to respond to demand and inflation

There's nuance between "fiscal policy to control demand" and "manually fiddle with tax rates all the time". I never attributed the latter to MMT advocates. Please read this comment again: https://www.themotte.org/post/995/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/210377?context=8#context

And you would have heard Wray say in every book or every talk that we could certainly get some demand-pull inflation before true full employment if simply pumping fiscal stimulus via general spending, which is a demonstrated lesson from the 60s keynesians

"An approximately flat SRAS curve". Please read my comment again: https://www.themotte.org/post/995/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/210377?context=8#context

As for your last paragraph, sorry: I am not going to go through the dynamic I mentioned in the comment you responded to, when I have literally explained how I have waded through the same incredibly tedious rhetorical strategies (strawmanning, motte-and-bailey etc.) from MMTists in the past. Unfortunantely, nothing you have said makes me expect discussing the issue with you to be any different. I am not going to go through dismantling a whole set of unattributed strawmannings again. Based on how you're trying to frame things, I could show chapter-and-verse that every economists believes X, but you could still say, "Ah, but here's a politician who said..." Can you try to empathise how tedious that would be for me?

But please read my comment again, especially before you make assertions about whether I have read things or read them carefully.