This whole debate arose when you claimed that the government could have unlimited debt, which could be paid for through unlimited money printing. You have been claiming the government has no real government debt but it is a money printing (or creating) process, which is contradictory to your position on the expansion of the government debt. If government debt increases it will lead to inflation and that will be damaging to the economy. My argument is the tools MMT uses to control inflation are in themselves consequential.
You should read again what I wrote. The United states does not borrow in the usual sense of the word "borrow" and has no "debt" in usual sense of the word "debt". The amount of money it can print and spend into the economy without debasement is limited by productivity. I have made this clear to whomever reads what I wrote. Every Nation that issues its own fiat money is subject to the same fundamental constraint. To understand what I write, you must interpret my words within the immediate context and avoid taking my words out of context and then subscribing some entirely different meaning to them.
No you have definitely claimed in the past that there is no limit to how much government debt the government can hold. Plud the techniques MMT uses to limit debasement and inflation are consequential in their own right.
I feel you have back tracked on your comments and that you are denying your existing positions. I appreciate your position on your understanding that government debt is not how you would see a debt due to it being based on your understanding of Fiat money. However you ignore the fact that fiat money holds its value due to its ability to be purchased on an exchange at a certain price. You instead claim its value derives from future taxation income, which is outside of the normal understanding of currency value. Many times you have made claims the government debt can be expanded limitlessly due to it being supported by a money creating process. This contradicts your own position on its value being based on future taxation income, there is a limit to how much taxation the government can charge and therefore to the currency's value. Then there is your complete absence of appreciation of the impact on the demand for the currency from abroad, which determines its exchange rate value and purchasing power. Say for example you increase taxation to support the currency's value, under your understanding of currency value. Taxation is a deterrent to foreign investment and will lead to less interest in purchasing the currency reducing its price, under the market forces model. You also claim that MMT will increase taxation if the rate of inflation rises to dampen demand, this would also impact the currency's value and reduce the purchasing power to buy goods from abroad. You are basing your actions purely on domestic operations. I am finding from my long term and deeper analysis of your comments that MMT is covering up a taxation programme, which is used to support the domestic trading of your economy at the expense of international trade. With MMT the currency value is sustained through future taxation income, the economic control mechanism is taxation increases and the government can just print money which is controlled by further taxation increases to reduce the inflation it creates. Is this what MMT is? A taxation based economic control system in secret?
I get it. You feel that way. But have you considered that the way you "feel" may be dead wrong? When you or I must buy something, and we don't have the money to pay for it, we first borrow the money, then we buy, and then we pay back our creditor over time. The order is borrowing, buying, paying. Contrast that with the order of events when the government wants to spend and it doesn't have the money. It buys first, then it prints (this is something we can't do!), then it appears to borrow. This is not at all the same order we must follow, and we certainly can' t print! However the government is not really borrowing. It is just exchanging its bond for the money it has already printed out of thin air and spent into the economy. Once this sinks in, you will understand: 1) why there is no national debt, and 2) why technically the government can spend without limit (but don't make the silly mistake of thinking they can do this in actual practice -- because there are real constraints.) If you continue to take my words out of the context of the overall picture I have painted for you. Then I won't correspond with you any longer. The best thing you could do for yourself is buy a copy of economist Stephanie Kelton's paperback book, the "Deficit Myth". It is written without jargon in a way anyone can understand. I will say that I think she should have called it the "Debt Myth" instead. I consider deficits as being real because I define them as the difference between Treasury tax receipts and expenditures. However Kelton is correct as far as the overall accounting goes. There really is no deficit, from an accounting standpoint, when you treat newly printed money as Treasury income. (That new money is deposited into the Treasury's Reserve Account by the Fed which is covering Treasury overdrafts using, figuratively, computer key strokes. This is , as I have pointed out until I am blue in the face, the fundamental money creation step.) A minor criticism I have of Kelton's Book is that she gives way to much credit to Warren Mosler when she calls him the father of MMT. He did start referring to the detailed explanation of how our government's fiscal and monetary operations work as "Modern Monetary Theory", but most of the work had been done before Mosler by three generations of economists who made it their life's work to understand government money operations, starting with Abba Lerner, whom I personally consider to be the real father of MMT. The discussion in Kelton's book starting at the bottom of page 69 and running through the end of the Chapter is alone worth the price of the book! This you will find to be an easier read than L. Randall Wray's scholarly work "Understanding Modern Money" , which is essential reading for any economist. It's what got me interested in this topic. If you haven't studied this stuff, than you should not be calling yourself an economist, and you most certainly shouldn't be commenting on MMT until you have read what the MMT economists have to say... As Moynihan once said, you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.
I have only borrowed money once in my life to purchase something and that was just to see how a credit card worked, many other people are like this too. In terms of the government borrowing money not being borrowing, it is called borrowing because it is expected to pay returns in the future. You are also seeing the currency as paper that the government prints, it is a commodity that is traded on an exchange. Any alteration in its availability or supply will impact its value and purchasing price. The whole concept of the government printing money effects the supply and trading value of the commodity. Plus you have ignored the whole aspect of returns on government borrowing which makes it more than simply exchanging a bond for money, there is a future cash flow aspect of the whole agreement.
Another rabbit hole thread brought on by a particular member espousing "pension pumping". #notarealeconomist