Deficits

This is Joseph.

This is an interesting tweet thread by Jeffery Brown.  Here is an image of a few tweets:

What is really interesting here is not that Dr. Brown is wrong.  He isn't.  He is completely correct. 

What is interesting is where the focus is.  In the thread he names two MMTers, Bernie Sanders (an independent failed presidential nominee) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a Democratic nominee for the house who is not even elected yet). 

Now I am huge believer in fiscal responsibility.  Here is Fortune on the recent tax cuts:

Trump’s heady economic potion, however, is masking misguided policies that could leave those same businesses with a severe hangover from today’s celebration. The U.S. government’s huge and growing budget deficits have become gargantuan enough to threaten the great American growth machine. And Trump’s policies to date—a combination of deep tax cuts and sharp spending increases—are shortening the fuse on that fiscal time bomb, by dramatically widening the already unsustainable gap between revenues and outlays. On our current course, we’re headed for a morass of punitive taxes, puny growth, and stagnant incomes for workers—a future that’s the precise opposite of what Trump champions.

I think Jodi Beggs identified why this is important here:

I would like to think carefully about the deficit.  I think that balance of payments is important and I remember that hyper-inflation is something that can really happen.  But if the focus is on minor players on the party out of power and not on the people actually increasing the deficit now, it is now wonder that people wonder about motives.  If the deficit becomes a political argument than the bad fiscal consequences I would like to avoid become a lot more likely.