Mint The Coin

“Money” is a fabrication, an illusion, a social construct, an agreed upon lie.

The Rock-Star Appeal of Modern Monetary Theory
By Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, The Nation
May 8, 2017

For a small but committed group of economists, academics, and activists who adhere to a doctrine called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), though, #mintthecoin was the tip of the economic iceberg. The possibility of a $1 trillion coin represented more than mere monetary sophistry: It drove home their foundational point that fiat currency is a social construct, and that there are therefore no fiscal limits on how much a sovereign currency-issuing nation can spend.

According to this small but increasingly vocal cohort of economists, including Bernie Sanders’s former chief economic adviser, once we change the way we think about money, we can provide for everyone: We don’t have to “find” the money to “pay” for universal health care by “cutting” the budget elsewhere. In fact, our government already works that way: Spending must precede taxation, or there would be no dollars in the economy to tax. It’s the political will to spend on certain things, not the money to afford it, that’s lacking.

“The idea that you can’t feed hungry kids and build a bridge is a huge problem,” says Stephanie Kelton, an economist at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. “It’s cruel to say we want more money for education and food but have to wait for legislation.”

Kelton, who spoke about the coin on MSNBC, is MMT’s most mediagenic expert. She’s 48 years old, whip-smart, impeccably coiffed, and brims with enthusiasm—important for someone who spends half her time telling Wall Street types to rethink their basic approach to economics. When San-
ders ran for the Democratic nomination, Kelton became his chief economic adviser at the recommendation of several prominent left-wing economists, including Dean Baker and Jamie Galbraith. Before that, she served as chief economist on the Senate Budget Committee and moonlighted as the editor of a blog called New Economic Perspectives.
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Modern Monetary Theory emerged as a 
distinct school of economic thought in the 1990s, when Kelton and her colleagues—mainly professors with homes in heterodox economics departments like the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and Bard’s Levy Institute—published research and discussed their theories, albeit mainly among themselves on a now-defunct listserv called “Post-Keynesian Thought” and at an annual conference that started in 2003.

The various strains of thought that make up MMT have their roots in Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes, along with more contemporary thinkers like Hyman Minsky and Abba Lerner, but only recently have researchers connected the dots in quite this way. “We’ve rediscovered old ideas,” Kelton said, “and assembled them into a complete macroeconomic frame.”

To a layperson, MMT can seem dizzyingly complex, but at its core is the belief that most of us have the economy backward. Conventional wisdom holds that the government taxes individuals and companies in order to fund its own spending. But the government—which is ultimately the source of all dollars, taxed or untaxed—pays or spends first and taxes later. When it funds programs, it literally spends money into existence, injecting cash into the economy. Taxes exist in order to control inflation by reducing the money supply, and to ensure that dollars, as the only currency accepted for tax payments, remain in demand.

It follows that currency-issuing governments could (and, depending on how you lean politically, should) spend as much as they need to in order to guarantee full employment and other social goods. MMT’s adherents like to point out that the federal government never “runs out” of money to fund the military, but routinely invokes budget constraints to justify defunding social programs. Money, in other words, isn’t a scarce commodity like silver or gold. “To people who’ve worked in financial markets, who work at the Fed, this isn’t controversial at all,” says Galbraith, who, while not an adherent, can certainly be described as “MMT-friendly.”

The decisions about how to issue, lend, and spend money come down to politics, values, and convention, whether the goal is reducing inequality or boosting entrepreneurship. Inflation, MMT’s proponents contend, can be controlled through taxation, and only becomes a problem at full employment—and we’re a long way off from that, particularly if we include people who have given up looking for jobs or aren’t working as much as they’d like to among the officially “unemployed.” The point is that, once you shake off notions of artificial scarcity, MMT’s possibilities are endless. The state can guarantee a job to anyone who wants one, lowering unemployment and competing with the private sector for workers, raising standards and wages across the board.
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Despite the lack of official interest, austerity has given these MMT economists rock-star status. Kelton recalls a conference a few years back in Rimini, Italy, where her group sold out their initial venue and had to move the event to a basketball stadium. “When we were driving there, the parking lot was packed,” she says. “We asked the driver what was happening, and he said it was for us.” She thought he was kidding—until she saw the MMT signs in the background.

On this side of the Atlantic, the financial crisis, the tepid recovery, and the Occupy movement have paved the way for alternative ways of thinking about the economy, and the events of 2008–12 have made it clear that the US government had the money—it just chose to bail out the banking sector, not spend it on social welfare. This all served to validate many of the points that Kelton and her colleagues have been making for decades.

“We built credibility,” Kelton says, “and that helped us get established as a school of thought. The [New Economic Perspectives] blog helped us get a voice. It also gave us a historical record about being right about things like how the US downgrade wouldn’t make interest rates go up; that quantitative easing wasn’t inflationary; and that the eurozone would run into trouble. We were saying that in 1998!”
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It’s hard to imagine radical changes being made to the way politicians talk about money. It could take decades, even centuries, to make a dent in entrenched ideas about debt, scarcity, and supply. Even so, the time seems ripe for MMT: There is, particularly among young people, an enormous appetite for new solutions to the problems that modern economies face, from automation to offshoring. And the financial crisis has shaken the public’s trust in established ways of thinking. Take the universal basic income: A few years ago, it seemed unrealistic and utopian, but today, versions of the UBI have been embraced by Silicon Valley moguls, economists on the left and the right, and politicians around the world.

MMT is less prescriptive: It describes the way that money works in a way that an 8-year-old can grasp more readily than a PhD, which in itself is unnerving. “The contribution of MMT is not the discovery of new facts,” Galbraith says. “It’s a teaching core of things which are factually uncontroversial.” But its implications can be radically humane. What’s threatening to the establishment, Galbraith adds, “is that the narrative is very compelling.”