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Re:U.S. inflation rate rises to 13-year high of 5.4% by mindslight on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @10:55AM (#28852939)
What do you call the period from 1971-2019 when the government printed lots of money with no intention of paying it back, but only handed it out to the upper class? From my fiscally conservative Austrian perspective, MMT is actually an improvement - by creating direct price inflation (as opposed to just asset inflation that nobody dares to call real inflation), it forces the Fed to put the brakes on the printing press.
Re:U.S. inflation rate rises to 13-year high of 5.4% by dragonwriter on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @03:58PM (#28856879)
> MMT is actually an improvement - by creating direct price inflation

MMT doesn't create price inflation, it acknowledges that monetary effects (like inflation and deflation) are the only real constraints on government finances when spending its own fiat, and that requiring debt financing for net spending is a farcical result of pretending fiat is resource-limited commodity currency, and encourages abandoning that kind of fiscal fiction in favor of expressly considering monetary effects in setting the kind of policy that has historically been called “fiscal”.

Re:U.S. inflation rate rises to 13-year high of 5.4% by mindslight on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @07:24PM (#28858776)
I agree with you - MMT mostly just acknowledges the dynamic that has already been in place for the past 50 years, ultimately letting the government regain the power to spend money where it deems fit (eg infrastructure), rather than being bound by this "lending" facade that mainly directs new money to the financial industry.

What I mean by it causing price inflation is that money directly spent (especially on social welfare programs) tends to flow to consumers within one or two hops, where it will directly bid up the CPI. Whereas money that is "loaned" tends to linger in the financial economy and mainly causes asset inflation (which only eventually, maybe, causes price inflation). By making the economic feedback loop shorter, MMT makes the results of monetary inflation more apparent, and from an Austrian perspective this is a good thing.

Re:U.S. inflation rate rises to 13-year high of 5.4% by tharne on Wednesday October 13, 2021 @11:24AM (#28853346)
I'm an Austrian myself, and that's an interesting take on MMT I hadn't considered. I'll have to noodle on that one for a bit.