Have faith.

Have faith.

Believe in your source.

Have faith.

I refer often to Martin Luther King in the context of the civil rights movement.

He said.

He said, I have no plan for the tranquilizing drugs, for the tranquilizing drum of gradualism and incrementalism.

Here's another episode of Macro and Cheese with your host, Steve Grumby.

This is Steve with Macro and Cheese.

And we have Jeva Nursesian coming back to join me today.

We're going to talk about a blended subject that has been struggle busing for me probably forever, but it's really come peak here lately.

And everything from post Keynesians getting the money story wrong.

They're like, interest rates are here and it's a good time for the government to borrow.

And I'm like, what are you even talking about?

They've got their school of thought, they've got their models, and of course this is what they believe.

And we're supposed to believe that post Keynesians are like literally the kissing cousins of mmt.

And I'm saying, but you get the money story wrong.

You get it wrong up front.

How could that be?

And then you watch on YouTube, the alt media folks, they're out there literally talking about the end of the Dollar is nine and all the bloviating clickbait titles and the really bad excuse for economic conversation, and it really pollutes the airwaves.

They say that all it takes is a couple easy to understand wrong ideas and it takes 10,000 words to debunk it.

And 10,000 words nobody's going to read because after all, if it didn't fit on a meme, it isn't going to make it into their brain pan.

They're just simply not going to process that information.

As this goes, I kept thinking to myself, I'm not trying to be an MMT economist.

I am a project manager by trade, thank you very much.

And I do happen to love modern monetary theory, which is why I've devoted so much of my personal time to exploring it, learning it, spreading it, getting the practitioners to come on and talk about it.

But I have a goal.

I'm a father.

I'm a human being, live in the real world.

And I want real world reasons to care about modern monetary theory, not some freaking model trapped in a glass case in a museum that's dusted off in a white paper that no one's read every few years.

I want it to matter to Main street, to the people that hear the lies from the politicians and hear the lies from the newspapers and ultimately walk around completely clueless as to the world in which they live.

And I think MMT as a rule, is a great lens.

And that's what it is.

It is indeed a lens for understanding the economy, for understanding the real restrictions and parameters and how to really assess whether the economy's doing well or not.

So I figured my friend Jeva, who is also more than a friend, Yeva is a phenomenal MMT mind.

She's written many papers with Randy Ray, who if you all don't know modern monetary theory, you got to get to know Randy Ray, who we've had on quite a few times as well.

Yeva is a Ph.D. associate professor of Economics and Department Chair at Franklin and Marshall College and a research scholar at Levy Economics Institute of Bard College.

Professor Nisian has published more than 25 journal articles, book chapters, and policy notes and policy briefs on the topics of modern monetary theory and policy theory, fiscal policy, the Green New Deal, and financial instability.

She is the editor of the Elgar Companion to Modern Monetary Theory with L. Randall Ray, and her work has appeared in publications such as the Guardian and the Hill and this outstanding podcast she has been a repeat guest on.

Yeva with that.

Thank you so much for agreeing to join me today.

Thanks for having me.

Always a pleasure.

Hey, yeah, I'm sure.

No, I'm joking.

I appreciate you doing this.

So for real, because I'll say a few names, there's guys like Danny High Fong that never miss the opportunity to talk about the end of the dollar is nigh, it's here.

And clickbait, clickbait, clickbait.

And within five minutes or less, he's got a hundred thousand views.

And we're out there begging the MMT community to share our podcast.

And we're lucky if we get 2,000 downloads a week, right?

It's a real struggle to get this information out there.

And you watch guys like Richard Wolff who talk about MMT and they absolutely butcher it, and in the worst possible way.

But then when you look at the number of people that he's reached, it's 450,000 have watched this video.

You're like, how in the world can actual MMT get out the chute so people understand it?

When we're up against people that really don't know it yet, they have huge audiences.

We've talked about trying to get the word out before, but honestly, the amount of misinformation out there is truly overwhelming.

I'm curious as you try to do this stuff, you didn't choose to be a heterodox economist because you thought, wow, this is a great way to move up the ladder.

Being a heterodox economist is like you're outside the mainstream, so you're fighting for every bit of oxygen you can get as well, with the orthodoxy clearly trying to drown out voices outside of the mainstream.

What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I mean, it's quite disappointing, honestly.

You have all of this alternative media universe.

There many who claim that they are on the left, they are progressives politically and so on.

And they may be politically, just like you can find a lot of mainstream economists who think that politically they're progressive.

And by some definitions, I guess you could say they are progressive.

However, the problem is you cannot be progressive without progressive economics.

So if your economics is still stuck in that mainstream money scarce, the government has to pay for its spending framework, then you really cannot be progressive.

Right.

Then what you're really asking for is tinkering around the edges.

Being progressive for me means that you want a lot that needs to be done, right?

On the economic sphere, a lot of changes need to happen to raise people's standard of living, to expand the opportunities to everyone, to build a stronger safety net, to expand public services, and so on and so forth.

The list goes on.

There is a lot of things we need to get done.

How are you going to get them done if you have the wrong economic framework?

The framework that says you have to raise taxes to pay for your spending, if the deficit is too high, you have to start cutting your spending?

Well, look at where we are.

We are exactly where that kind of thinking takes you.

Because if you play by those rules and then the other party is going to be happy to play by those rules because that's exactly what they want, then you get the big beautiful bill.

That's exactly what you get.

So when the bill was going through Congress, I wrote this op ed and I said that the tax cuts don't have to be paid for that.

Okay?

If you want to do your tax cuts for the wealthy, which at the time it was clear that they are going to happen, then at least do not pair them with cuts to Medicaid.

Do not pair them with cuts to government spending.

But if you are a Democrat and you keep insisting that deficits are really bad when the other party is in power, then that kind of thinking leads exactly to which spending do we need to cut to be able to afford the tax cuts?

And here we are.

So if you play by those rules, whether you think of yourself as a progressive politician who will not even say that the government cannot run out of money.

Despite being very well acquainted with mmt.

Right.

Having MMT economists that have been advising for a long time, you still can't do it.

And then you have all this supposedly progressive alternative media outlets that will still not say it.

Right.

They are still stuck in that scarce money mentality.

That doesn't leave a lot to hope for.

I want to jump to something you did the other day and I want to give you props because even if you don't listen all the time, I want to make sure you've been brought up several different times because I was so proud of you for actually asking Ro Khanna at the Levy conference a question that wasn't just a softball.

I just spoke to Ro Khanna personally face to face, several times, one of which was at a Millions for Medicare rally in Washington, D.C. i believe it was on the lawn of the Capitol.

Nina Turner was there.

Margaret Flowers was there.

A number of people were there people that had been around, Stephanie Kelton in particular, Nina and Roe, who, in my opinion, this is going back, I don't know, 2017, 2016 sometime.

So a lot's changed between 2016 and 2025, but I still don't see them boldly leading with this information.

In fact, Nina Turner never misses an opportunity to talk about the taxpayer dollar, no matter how many times we go to her and provide her Raul Carrillo and Jesse Myerson's articles and stuff that say, hey, by the way, just in case you were wondering, using the taxpayer narrative is pretty racist stuff because it literally gives that head tip or hat tip to the wealthy white landowner.

It really doesn't recognize that the plurality of quote unquote taxpayers.

And would you say that taxpayers are even represented in the current paradigm of spending?

And I would say human beings in general that are not part of the elite are not represented by any of this stuff.

Ro Khanna, when I talked to him directly, I said, robert, the only way any Bernie Sanders platform is ever going to come true is if you literally start leading with your chest with the MMT story.

And then he, of course, broke straight.

Oh, yeah, yeah, I know that.

Yeah, yeah.

And he broke right into this stuff about if you print too much money, there'll be inflation.

And I was like, goodness gracious, Ro, I really would like to see them get with the program.

But I don't see any indicator that that any of these leading voices, any of these people that we invite to conferences to speak as big speakers are actually carrying this message publicly or anywhere else, even privately, are you seeing anything different?

Cause my eyes are saying.

They aren't saying it at all.

I'm not on social media, so I'm seeing less than you are.

But, yeah, I'm not seeing that, actually.

Which is quite unfortunate because I think if maybe 10 years ago or so you weren't well versed in MMT, you didn't know about it as a politician, especially somebody who thinks of themselves as a progressive politician or thinking about the alternative media outlets that claim to be progressive, if you didn't know about MMT 10 years ago, okay, that would be forgivable, right?

It wasn't really out there, but it's really been out there since COVID and if anything, it's been validated over and over again since COVID Where did we find the 5 trillion?

We just created it.

Nobody said, oh, we don't have the money.

Where are we going to find it?

And if we needed five more, we could have done it.

And even if you want to blame the inflation for the government spending, which I think has, whether we like it or not, become the narrative that it was all because the government overdid it, they did too much, even if you buy that story, then that still validates mmt.

Because the MMT argument is that if you overdo it, it's not that the government's gonna run out of money.

It's not that the government's gonna be punished by.

What's going to happen is that you might face inflationary problems.

So even if you buy their argument that MMT has been vindicated, and Randy and I wrote this piece a few years ago, a short thing for Levy titled Is It Time to Celebrate mmt?

This was exactly our argument, right?

So then at this point, to say that, oh, I'm MMT curious or I'm MMT skeptical or whatever, it's so disappointing because at this point, if you're MMT curious, you should have at least made up your mind on it.

Okay, Sit down, engage with the ideas and decide.

Is this accurate or not?

Because it's one or the other, right?

There is no in between in a sense.

Either we have the scarce money framework, or we have the MMT framework, and you have to choose which one is the lens through which you're going to understand the real world economy.

There is no other option.

So then what I see is that either politicians and the media people, they're either avoiding this altogether.

So they will talk the progressive talk on the economy, they will talk about income and wealth inequality, they will talk about unemployment, they will Talk about all the things we want to do, like Medicare for All and so on.

But then if you don't have the correct economics, all of those are just going to be pipe dreams, right?

They're never going to materialize into real world policy.

So they talk the talk progressively on these issues, but they never go beyond that.

To then adopt, I would argue, progressive MMT framework, which would make those things possible.

And that's been really disappointing because at this point, you cannot just be MMT curious.

You gotta make up your mind, do you want the Scarce Money framework?

Is that the way you're going to view the world?

Or do you view it through the MMT framework because there is no other option.

I have strayed leftward, way leftward, probably way left of most MMT years, sadly.

And I'm happy to be left.

But I wish more MMT were moving left.

But one of the things that I stumbled onto, and I'm a late bloomer with a lot of this stuff, I'm not in any way, shape or form apologetic in the least.

I am very focused, if you will, on the idea that the working class has no power within our government sector, that the Gillens and page study in 2014 showed that voters have a near imperceptible impact on the outcomes of legislation, period.

And I've really focused on that because one of Stephanie Kelton's biggest mantras has been we gotta source the vote.

And when I look and I realize that this government has always been a government for and by elites.

And so how do you source the vote?

When in fact the representative democracy that we have is really more of a veneer to manufacture consent for what oligarchy does.

And as I watch this stuff, it's like, well, how would you get the people to fight back?

And I stumbled onto something that is, I would imagine UMKC probably teaches this stuff in their interdisciplinary studies.

And I would imagine as a heterodox economist, you gotta know what everybody else is thinking because that's kind of part and parcel with being able to show why MMT is a superior lens.

But in reading Gramsci in the Prison notebooks, I really started to gain a foothold understanding of what they call cultural hegemony and the idea that the ruling class creates these narratives that become common sense.

And everybody doesn't really fully understand why they believe what they believe, but they really believe it and they echo it.

And I think a lot of the narratives that MMT seeks to destroy are a direct result of cultural hegemony as well.

And the ruling classes narratives that they put out there.

And people are afraid to step out.

Which is why I salute heterodox economists, because they're taking the big risk being different, obviously straying from the path well traveled that leads to ruin.

So I'm curious, and if you're not familiar or you haven't read, or you're not interested in Gramsci, that's fine.

Do you agree at least, that the narratives that are spewed down are from an orthodoxy that was instituted by a ruling elite, a ruling establishment that has given rise to whatever is the common narrative, if you will.

And that is why it sticks, because it's in everything.

It's in the newspapers, it's in the TV shows, it's in your church bulletin, it's at your kids schools, it's everywhere.

The narrative never changes.

It's kind of hard to go against that.

Yeah, I haven't read Gramsci, but you made me think of another economist, Thorsten Veblen, who talks about institutions.

He's the institutionalist and talks about how the institutions came to be and all the predatory institutions that exist in a capitalist system and how they actually act as brakes on progressive change.

The change that in his view, is driven by technology.

For instance, just to give you an example, if we wanted to produce enough for everyone, we could, because that's how productive the capitalist system is.

We don't have a problem of an economy that's not productive enough.

We have a problem of an economy that's too productive.

So then Veblen says, you have to to restrict the amount of output that you're going to produce so that you can charge higher prices, so then you can earn profits.

This doesn't necessarily serve the interests of the community, it serves the interests of the business enterprise, because then they can earn these profits, because if they just allow the machine process to unleash technology so productive that we can just produce as much as we need, for instance, and then you have these predator institutions, like businesses, driven for the profit motive.

And of course you can add to that the whole shareholder value maximization, which just puts it on steroids, brings in the stock market and so on, and how that is hindering the social provisioning process, the process of people getting their needs satisfied and so on and so forth.

But at the same time, I think it's not an accident that free market economics is the dominant paradigm in economics, in a capitalist system.

Because if you have a capitalist system, then your dominant ideology has to be pro capitalist.

If you have a market economy, then Your dominant ideology has to be pro market economy.

Right.

You cannot have a capitalist economy where 80, 90% of your population is socialist.

Ideologically.

That just cannot happen.

Of course, that's the dominant ideology.

Like what Nancy Pelosi said.

I don't remember what the context was, but she was asked the question of what do you believe in?

Or what values does the United States have as a nation?

And I think the first thing she said is that, well, we all believe in capitalism.

That's not surprising.

Right?

That's just how it's going to be.

This is where, I guess the Keynesians and the Marxists are always at odds with each other.

So when you were talking about the government and whether the state is ever going to do the things that the regular people need, or whether it's going to serve the interests of the capitalist class and so on, I guess that's where you may want to listen to somebody like Richard Wolff, for instance, because the Keynesians are believers in change through government policies that Keynes, for you, classically, and even at his time, of course, Keynes tried really hard to have a say in economic policy in the uk and it was really difficult for even someone like Keynes.

I mean, during World War II, when he was trying to advance his ideas about what to do for inflation control, how to come out on the other side where people would have a better standard of living and so on, he was like knocking on doors, trying to talk to people, and it was really hard.

But that's the Keynesian paradigm that you can try to achieve change, slow, progressive change through government policies.

And of course, on the other hand, you have the Marxists who would say, how are you going to achieve any change through the government if the government is not run for the interests of your average person?

Right.

Which goes back to that political science paper that you were referencing.

And of course, we saw that.

I think Pablina had a Levy policy note on this about how even as Trump was elected, we had a lot of progressive ballot initiatives that passed, like raising minimum wage, for instance.

So then that tells you that the population and the population's economic values are not necessarily in line with those of our politicians.

Yeah, it's interesting.

I think that there is a lot to be said for local initiatives, but I believe also one of the things that has been most challenging is, is watching the kind of enthusiasm and excitement for local initiatives where, unfortunately, the purse strings don't exist.

Really.

The ability to enact bold legislation would require radical shifts and decentralization of the ability to spend money into existence.

Watching the state level and local level race to the bottom because these local and state governments are totally reliant on either bonds, investment or tax base.

Schools are funded by local taxation and by zip code and tax region and stuff.

These are things that if you start hiking up taxes to do bold initiatives at the state level will recreate many of those concerns that the average economist and the average person fears based on the household budget logic, which they're not a hundred percent one for one.

But they're not far off from state municipal governments who if they don't have the money, they can't do the thing and all of a sudden they have to institute austerity.

Or what you end up seeing is flight where you see the rich or you see the business owners and stuff move their companies out of state A and move them to like Texas or Florida where there's no tax and they leave these rust belts behind, they leave these deserts, these financially ruined communities.

You can see it in Detroit where when the car manufacturing was the big thing and then they took that away.

And you look in Pittsburgh when the steel mills.

Now Pittsburgh has bounced back significantly, but it's become a gentrified city full of yuppies and rich people.

You look at Buffalo, and Buffalo is the last of those things.

Even in my hometown here in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where they went bankrupt due to them just not having the foresight of the downturn economy and not being able to use Mosler's law, which is there's no economic problem so big that we can't spend more to fix it.

So I guess my question to you is that when you think about these local initiatives and the impact that they have based on their limited ability to fund and finance them, how would you explain to a public that doesn't understand the dividing line between federal government, state government, local governments and funding and just bold policy alternatives.

Yeah, I'm not a big believer in local initiatives for the reasons that you just mentioned.

Because if you want to do anything big, then you need federal government money because the state and local governments cannot create their own money.

They are tax constrained and so on.

Doesn't mean they can't do anything good.

I mean, if you're a big state like California or New York, you have a lot of tax money, maybe you can do a lot.

For instance, I think California had expanded Medicaid to a lot more people.

It's much easier to get government assistance in a state like California than it is, let's say, in a state like Pennsylvania.

But still these are very limited and if you're thinking of bigger policy goals, which as a macroeconomist and a realist, in a sense, right.

And thinking about whether it's job guarantee or Medicare for all, then it absolutely has to be at the federal level.

And yes, it's good that we have this decentralized governments, but as far as the conceptual understanding, it muddies the water because for the state and local governments, which is the level of the government that most people would interact with, taxes do pay for their spending.

So then people interact with the government that way.

They see their school taxes, they see that one school district is better than the other because they have more tax money.

So they can have better schools, nicer equipment in their school, a big pool, a planetarium, you name it, and others cannot.

So people can see that kind of thing happening directly.

While they might not necessarily interact with the federal government, the federal government with its purse strings and so on is a very abstract concept for the average American.

The only way they interact with the federal government most of the time is by paying taxes.

So for most people, the transfers are going from people to the federal government at the personal level.

So then I think that does muddy the water because people then tend to think of the government like a household.

And that's quite unfortunate.

And I think Covid was such a missed opportunity in that sense.

Again, for anybody who wanted any kind of progressive change, whether it's politicians like Bernie Sanders, who could have said, look, I've been saying we need to pay for all of these things.

And I've been trying to come up with this Alphabet soup of tax increases that would pay for the X, Y and Z policy.

But here we just found $5 trillion out of nowhere.

So then next time, if I want to propose some policy, don't ever ask me how you're going to pay for it.

I think that was such a missed opportunity in that way huge, that you could have used that as an example.

And instead of saying, oh my God, we cannot talk about spending a dime anymore, because look where it got us.

Retreating on that front, going backwards rather than pushing forward and owning it and saying you were saying we didn't have money and now we found the 5 trillion without any issues and the sky didn't fall.

If anything, we had the shortest recession on the record because of all of those things that we did.

It's interesting you bring that up.

I want to go back to something else you brought up here before I jump into that.

And that is the point at Richard Wolff, momentarily.

I am a socialist and I'M an mmt'.

Er.

And a lot of socialists have no interest whatsoever in MMT because in their world, the end state is a cashless communist utopia.

And the Social Democrats tend to be much more dismissive these kinds of changes because they still have very much the wrong economic understanding as well.

But Richard Wolff actually goes out of his way.

Yep.

To explain mmt.

I'm just going to be honest with you.

It's terrible.

It's probably worse than if he just didn't say anything about it at all.

All he has to do is drop a single video and instantly it'll have 500,000 views.

People love Richard Wolff.

And for all the stuff he's done in New York City and all the keeping the heartbeat alive about socialist ideas in this country, you got to tip your hat to him in those areas.

But for his macroeconomics, it just doesn't make any sense.

And people get it so badly wrong.

And I know some of my own people internally here at RP are going to get mad at me for what I'm going to say.

But there's a religious segment here of socialists that kind of refer to, thus say, if the random old school theorist.

And it's like, well, Marx didn't say anything about fiat currency, so and so didn't talk about it.

And Richard Wolff, when he does talk about it, he gets it terribly wrong.

So one of the big challenges is not only does he get it wrong, but I think guys on the post Keynesian side get the same thing wrong.

It's like, well, now's a good time for the government to borrow because interest rates are low.

I'm like, do you guys not understand the relationship between the government interest rates and whether the government spends or doesn't spend?

I mean, the concept of interest rates was somewhat baffling, I guess, because early on when I started learning mmt, all I heard was we have an interest rate because that interest rate is supposed to defend a positive interest rate, you know, at the Fed.

So the reason why we sell bonds, the reason why we do these things, is because we want to defend a positive interest rate.

And for a long period of time, we had a zero interest rate policy or a near zero interest rate policy.

That has changed since then.

But what it's doing, in the absence of congressional spending, it's still providing an interest income channel to the rich, mind you, to the people that already have money.

It is so poorly understood.

And poor Richard, he goes out there and says the US government is borrowing from corporations.

What are you talking about?

Richard, you've had lunch many times with Stephanie Kelton.

You've taught in her classroom, you've been at conferences with her.

You guys probably run in the same circles.

How is it that you could butcher this so badly and you feel bad pistol whipping the guy because you know he's an ally, but he gets it so wrong and his followers are so devoted to the religion of Richard Wolff that they will not hear anything you have to say.

I'm curious what your thoughts are on that, because I know this is entering into that professional space, but it's also, how could you get this so wrong?

Well, I mean, the critique from the left, I never understood that.

I think the right criticizes MMT because they think it has an implicit progressive bias, that if you could pay for anything because financially you're not constrained, it's only about the resources, then there is a lot of things that are possible, right?

Maybe Medicare for All is possible, maybe a job guarantee is possible.

Things that the right doesn't want to happen.

So for them, they believe that it has an implicit left wing slash progressive bias.

So that from that perspective, if you even think about it pragmatically, shouldn't the leftists be invested in MMT actually being right?

I just don't get it.

You might be waiting for your revolution, I don't know.

And I don't want to be dismissive of that, but meanwhile, can we please try to get people healthcare and guaranteed jobs and things like that?

If you want that, or even something that is near and dear to Rick's heart, which is cooperatives.

Right.

Could you have government support?

And I've heard him talk about that how other countries like Italy do government support for cooperatives.

And that's a great policy, if you want that kind of policy.

Don't you want MMT to be right?

I just don't understand what the calculation there is, even if you think about it pragmatically.

So then I think you should be invested in trying to fully understand it and not just have this strawman version and be like, okay, if there is even a 1% chance that this theory is right, I'm actually going to engage with it.

And I'm just going to figure out instead of that you have some kind of strawman version of it and misinterpreting it, printing money kind of a approach.

That's just so disappointing.

And it's extra disappointing because I remember when I was at grad school at umkc, Rick Wolf came there a couple of times.

He did engage with MMT So his engagement with MMT goes back much, much farther than, I don't know, whatever meetings he's been having with Stephanie Kelton or not.

And at the time he seemed to be largely in agreement with mmt.

So when people, and of course I'm not on social media, I'm not following things.

So when people were saying, have you seen what Rick Wolf has been doing?

I'm like, what do you mean?

I thought he was on board.

So it was surprising.

And I have to say, if he wants to talk about mmt, why doesn't he invite an MMT or, and debate them on it?

That would be the honest thing to do.

Yeah, so I guess I'm calling him out on that right here.

Right.

I know personally it's not like he hasn't had an opportunity to invite an MMT or on his show to talk about mmt and he has not taken that opportunity.

I think that would be the honest thing for him to do.

As for post Keynesians, their resistance to MMT is also kind of baffling for me because at the core of it, MMT is a Keynesian framework.

And I use it in the broad sense of the world, that demand drives the economy, that as Stephanie Kelton says, capitalism runs on sales.

That's the Keynesian framework, that it's a demand driven economy that we live in.

From that perspective, then Keynes goes and says we're generally going to have a shortage of demand without government intervention.

And he has this technical explanation for why that's going to be the case.

And a shortage of demand translates into shortage of jobs and unemployment.

And so if you want there not to be unemployment, or if you want to lower your unemployment, then you have to use fiscal policy.

That means that the Keynesian framework, which is demand driven, naturally leads to the conclusion that you need fiscal policy.

From that perspective, I just don't understand what the Post Keynesians want.

If you're going to criticize MMT and say it's wrong because you cannot solve these problems through government spending, then what are you saying?

I think it's a self critique in a sense because it's a critique of the Keynesian framework.

And what is the alternative like?

I always think about that.

So if the MMT's proposed fiscal policy is the job guarantee, price stability, full employment, what is the Post Keynesian alternative?

Tax and spend?

Is that the alternative that we can't spend without taxing?

I mean, I've called Post Keynesians on it at conferences and they've said you can't just Spend without taxing, because then you're going to run into problems.

Look at what happened in the UK when Liz Truss was Prime Minister.

We tried to do this and then the markets punished her and then she was out of the job in two weeks.

That's not what happened there.

And it wasn't a problem of the UK government not being able to fund itself.

It was a problem of the central bank not wanting interest rates to go down, or at least not resisting interest rates going up, so to speak.

So then you cannot have a Keynesian framework for me without also having the MMT framework.

Because again, if you need fiscal policy to fill your demand gap, then how are you going to pay for that fiscal policy?

And even in your macro 101, you learn that if you tax and spend, your multiplier effects are going to be much smaller than if you just spend without taxing.

So if you just go to that basic orthodox Keynesian framing, then even from there you get to this conclusion that just deficit spending or spending without taxation is actually better for the economy than spending combined with taxation.

And the low rates argument is also silly because Paul Krugman was making that argument for many years after the global financial crisis, basically saying right now is a great time to spend because the interest rates are low, so we can borrow and we can spend and so on.

But what happens when interest rates are high and you still need to spend?

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It goes back to you corner yourself because you have the wrong framework, just like you corner yourself with the deficits.

When you complain about deficits, you lead to more spending cuts like in the Big Beautiful Bill.

So if you have the wrong framework and you're not consistent, then when the situation has changed, when such as interest rates are higher now and you cannot make the argument that, oh, the government can still spend, it's not a problem of being able to afford the spending.

So with the wrong framework, you're always going to end up cornered.

That's my position.

You might not like the tax cuts, but you cannot use the wrong framing for it.

You cannot say tax cuts are bad because they're going to lead to a deficit.

Tax cuts were bad because of the distributional effects.

They were going to have the income and wealth distribution.

That's why they were bad and that's what needed to be hammered on.

Instead.

We're talking about, well, tax cuts are bad because they're going to add to the deficit.

And the Republicans say, okay, then we will pair them with spending cuts if that's what you want.

If you don't want the deficit, then that's what we're going to do.

So let's take just another step back momentarily.

And when you think about all the self defeating ideas that groups that should be our allies put in front of this, and there are a lot, by the way, I'm sure you know it, but there are an awful lot.

And one of my favorite people in the world love her to death is Clara Matei and she wrote a wonderful book called the Capital Order.

The problem is that Clara does not think MMT is like a thing.

Like when I explained to her that taxes literally do not fund the federal government, the federal government funds taxpayers and stuff, she still yeah, but in the end it's really just taxpayer money kind of thing.

No, Clara, that's not true.

And she and Richard Wolff and another gentleman who I've had on the show as well, Steve Mar, who's a really nice guy and a socialist.

I'm trying really hard to find ways into their world so that they understand the way fiat currencies work.

And there's a lot of things that are on like marxist.org and stuff like that that people read that are quote unquote debunking mmt, but they're not debunking MMT at all.

In fact, when you read it, you realize what they're talking about is political economy.

And what they're talking about is things that I happen to agree with most of them.

But the problem is they are associating the capacity of a currency issuing government with labor theory of value or oh well, capitalism has a propensity for the rate of profit to fall.

And there are all these different things that Marx taught and that Hegel's taught and that have been mainstays and core elements of their political economy, of which I would say, hey, maybe those things are 100% right.

Except you don't fundamentally understand that money is a creature of the state.

So if you capture the state, I mean, just assuming their political ideology, because MMT is nothing if it's not a lens, right?

So your values are your ideology, but MMT is mmt.

Whether it's in the hands of a Republican, a Democrat, a socialist or whoever, it ultimately will reflect the values of the people and I say it meaning the economy will reflect the values of the people that are in control of creating the money.

And if there's no democracy to speak of that in terms of democratic decision making about where money is spent, you're going to see all these very pro capitalist, very pro banking, very pro profit motive minded outcomes.

And they erroneously attribute that to mmt.

And even if a lot of the policy space that comes from MMT is based on Keynes, the political leanings of a socialist are not.

I mean, they may not want to see private ownership, but that's not mmt.

But mmt, if you said we're going to nationalize these companies, MMT would still describe the way the currency issuing government can fund those entities.

I don't see why there's a contradiction there.

Am I making sense or am I completely off here?

Yeah, exactly.

I don't really have an explanation for why we don't have MMT being embraced by the right minded people, people who should be our allies, people who should want it to be correct.

Because mmt, I think one of the things that it does is it reconceptualizes the state and says as far as the monetary system side of the economy goes, the state is not something that's alien to it.

It's been there from the beginning, it's been important in developing this important institution which drives a capitalist economy.

So in other words, it debunks this demarcation that mainstream economists like to create between the private and the public sector, that you have the economy that just exists on its own.

And then here you have the government coming in and trying to usurp certain powers, trying to tell people what they can and cannot do and so on and so forth, and that they see that as a problem while MMT says, well, and this is in line with heterodox economics, right?

This is Carl Polyani for instance, saying that this demarcation, that clear cut that we try to create between the state and the private sector doesn't really exist.

That the labor market was created by government action, through government action.

We're talking about enclosure movements in England which closed off the property that peasants used to live on for centuries and then they sent them to the cities to become wage laborers.

It didn't just happen.

People didn't just pack up and say, you know what, we're just gonna take off and go to the city and be fed into this industrial machine.

They were forced to.

There were laws that prevented them from hunting and fishing, for instance.

Well, who did that?

It was the State, right.

So the state was there in creation of the labor market, just like MMT explains that the state or some centralized power was there from the beginning in the money story.

So it's not something that the state usurped from the private sector.

And I think this is important because then there is the question of, well, what are the legitimate responsibilities of the state?

If you create this clear demarcation, then you are saying that the state shouldn't have any legitimate involvement in the private economy.

That's your free market economics right there.

But if you say the market doesn't exist without the state, the state has always been there from the beginning, or money doesn't exist without the state, so the government has always been at the source of money.

That changes the way you view government actions in the real world.

And from that perspective, MMT being in line with the heterodox tradition, I think of not demarcating.

So clearly the public and the private spheres, I think should have been an additional bonus, so to speak, for why it should have endeared MMT to heterodox economists.

I don't really understand where all of the.

Not just opposition, but sometimes it's resentment.

Even I would say, yeah, like the Doug Henwood critique of mmt, that was not nice at all.

I don't get it.

And I don't really have a good explanation for why that's happening.

I mean, I agree with a lot of non MMT critique.

The things that they critique of capitalism I'm in lockstep with almost exclusively.

But the one thing that really baffles me is that when you're looking at the government and you say, okay, there's several ways of looking.

I come from a right wing background, I went left.

So I know both sides of the game and everything in between to some degree.

And I look at it like this.

Whose interests are being served?

And when you look at the outcomes of public policy, it's not the people that are being served, it's industry, it is capitalist institutions, it is mega corporations that write the laws, that hand down the regulatory frameworks, that politicians that don't have a clue about the world just simply rubber stamp and put forward because they don't have the chops to really make a meaningful input to it.

And so they're making laws and stuff like that in the favor of the oligarchy, in favor of Silicon Valley oligarchs, in favor of Bitcoin oligarchs, in favor of petroleum oligarchs, you name it.

So it's easy to understand, in my opinion anyway, why there is skepticism of anything that would come from the government.

Because the other side of that is we are the government.

The government is we are.

It's, it's we the people.

Right?

And this kind of infantile belief that we are voting our way to freedom, that we can vote away the oligarchy, that we can simply vote away the capitalists elements.

And I believe that's equally naive.

And I think that they oftentimes will conflate those things that are true, the things that your eyes don't lie.

You know that the economy is serving oligarchs.

It's hard pressed to find points where the oligarchy wasn't 100% the beneficiary of policy.

There's very few times you can say ah, no, there's a policy for the working class.

You couldn't even get the pro act through.

So to say legislation has served the working class or socialist endeavors.

It's super, super simple to understand why they don't trust it because I don't trust it.

I don't believe that the state serves our needs anymore.

Sure.

That doesn't change the validity of mmt.

It just changes who is in power.

And when I say power, I'm not just talking about this facade of Democrat, Republican, both two capitalist part parties that are still pushing capitalist agendas.

I'm talking about any kind of thing that would challenge the hegemony of the capitalist ruling order.

And I know it's not just one capitalist oligarchy.

It is many different factions of this that come together for various affinities.

But it has nothing to do with we the people.

So I think that's where the pushback comes from, that they see that and they can't get past it.

And to me I use that and I say, let me radicalize you.

Let me show you the exact tools of the weapons of our demise that they use to institute austerity, to institute these things that bring pain and suffering and literally are used to discipline us, to make us malleable for whatever else they're going to try and force us to consent to.

So it really does matter what the purpose of government is.

If the purpose of government is, is to exact the will and desire of we the people, then sure.

But if the goal of government is to exact the will of markets and the exact the will of the oligarchy and the ruling elite, then what do we have here?

And I think that's a very valid question.

And I think to really achieve the outcomes that we're striving for.

You've got to have a government that serves the people.

I think that might be the socialist pushback here, is that they don't believe that the government in any way, shape or form, or its institutions can either be reformed or reasoned with because their purpose and who benefits is the capital order.

But if that's your worldview, doesn't MMT actually strengthen your critique?

You could say, well, look at this.

They have the power of money that they could have used to make people's lives better, and they're not doing it.

So this is additional proof that the government is not there to serve you.

So from that perspective, I just don't understand how they could have taken that and run with it and say, hey, look at this, they could just create 5 trillion out of nowhere.

And they did all these things, and all of this time they've been saying that we don't have money to do this, we don't have money to do that.

We need to do austerity, we need to tighten our belts.

So instead of doing that, you just say, no, MMT is wrong, because this and that I just don't understand because I don't think the two are contradictory.

You can be critical of the government and the way it interacts with the economy and whose interests are being served, while accepting the descriptive MMT framework.

Like leaving the policy prescriptions aside, just saying that this is how money works, this is where money comes from, and these are the limits on what can and cannot be done.

I think that would have strengthened that critique.

And at the same time, I'm not very hopeful right now, but I don't know what else you can do.

I think if I were a progressive and didn't have an MMT framework, I would be so much more hopeless because then it would be like, yes, there are all these things that we want to get done, but we can't afford it.

So on top of all the other hurdles that you have to pass, like political to be able to pass a policy that you want, if on top of all of that, you also had the scarce money framework, wouldn't that make it even worse?

Wouldn't that make you even more pessimistic?

Yeah, yeah.

So let me throw this at you quickly because I think that this is also very important when you say, what can you do right?

To me, whether or not there's quote unquote revolution, and my goodness, I'm a history guy, so I've watched and I look at different revolutions and so forth and the conditions for which we would have a revolution in this country.

I think there's reason to believe that there's some potential for that, but I don't think that would end up the way any of us would necessarily like.

Right.

I mean, the right wing is much further down the Runway to making that a reality than we are.

But without that said, I believe that in order to make anything change, to make the oligarchy listen, okay, you've got to have your political economy and your organizing and such like, even if you're not worried about elections, just being able to do direct action, be able to do protests, be able to organize.

I frequently talk about parallel systems and talk about building dual power a la the Black Panthers, things like that.

I believe that in order to be taken seriously, you've got to have some sort of power and the absence of power within the established mechanisms, you know what I mean?

I think that's all that we have, in my opinion.

Now, mind you, I'm seeking to radicalize people.

I want people to ask themselves, why don't we have health care?

Why don't we have a Green New Deal?

Why don't we have college for free?

Why are we being burdened with heavy loans?

Even when we do earn more, we really don't earn that much more because we're paying it in student debt back.

So what would have been a great salary on paper?

You have to calculate all the student debt costs to go with it as well.

To me, I'm here to radicalize people.

I'm not even hiding anymore.

In my days of, hey, let's get out and vote for a few more progressives are over.

I'm not there anymore.

That's not who I am anymore.

I think elections do serve an opportunity to educate people, to teach people of what is possible and what is not possible, and point specifically to why it isn't possible.

I think you need to have a reason for the hope that lies within.

And my hope is in people waking up and having that epiphany.

A lot of people know this stuff, but it doesn't transform them.

I see a lot of folks that just say, oh, it's great investment opportunity.

Now that I understand the way government spending is, let me just go ahead and research when to invest and when not to invest and when to buy bonds and when not to buy bonds.

Oh, yeah, Chauncey, yeah.

Yeah, that ain't me either, because I'm truly striving for working class solidarity and really a socialist.

So my goal here is to bring about public ownership and want to see people own the means of their own production and be able to not be alienated from their work and so forth.

Probably pipe dreams, but you got to strive for something.

And MMT showed me before I got to this point what was possible.

And it was only when I asked why we didn't have it that it became the radicalizing tool that it has been for me anyway.

I think MMT can serve every constituency because it's non political, but money is inherently political once the state spends it.

Like for example, if you say I'm not a radical, but I'm going to go ahead and speak at JP Morgan and I'm going to go ahead and speak to this conference of bankers about the economy and so forth.

You are, to quote Rush, Getty Lee, even if you don't decide, you still have made a choice.

Choosing not to decide is still a choice or something like that.

I'm screwing it up.

But you get my point is that you're still validating the orthodox order that is still ideological.

And ultimately if you don't have a vision for where you're trying to go and FADL Kaboob is very, very good about talking about a vision.

If you don't have a vision for yourselves, you're going to be part of someone else's vision.

I would like the working class and I would like leftists to really truly understand this so that they can in turn take the very real organizing goals that they have and base them on something real and not the Danny High Fung, the death of the dollar is nigh kind of approach, which is.

I love Danny.

He's been on the show before and I know a lot of the folks that, that we work with love to hear Danny too.

And his geopolitical analysis is usually really spot on.

It's just his economic analysis is pretty lacking.

Yeah, but we're at that time I want to ask you, I mean you always got something.

You're writing with Randy Ray, so I want to give you a chance to tell us what stuff you got coming up, but more importantly give you the final word on this wandering subject that I think has been really powerful to me anyway.

Well, interestingly, since you mentioned the financiers and JPMorgan Chase and so on, I think these are the people that embrace the MMT first as far as the descriptive side goes as a way to understand the world.

I tell my money and banking students, you can have your ideology, but if you want to go out there and make money, you got to understand how the world works.

So in a sense, it's not like these people don't have political leanings or ideologies.

It's just that they are pragmatic in the sense that, okay, we gotta understand how money works, how government bonds work and so on if we want to be able to make the correct bets as far as the economy goes.

So in a sense, they're able to put their ideology aside to embrace something like mmt, while you have left wingers who can't do the same, even though you could say that it can be in line with whatever your ideology is.

And it's often blamed by the right wingers for being too much on the left.

I think when the financial crisis started, there was all this talk about the end of neoliberalism.

I don't remember people talking about what replaces it.

There was this assumption that whatever is going to come is going to be better.

And I think the experience since has invalidated that.

Whatever this is, whether it's the end of neoliberalism or a different version of neoliberalism.

Right.

Like you said, that revolution.

And this takes us back to Veblen, who had a very evolutionary approach to the economy.

It's not deterministic.

You don't know which way it's going to go.

Can be left or it can be right.

If you're at the crossroads, and I feel like we are at those crossroads.

And so if you want it to go more to the left rather than to the right, then you really.

It's essential for you to have the correct economics.

Okay, let me jump in there real quick.

I'm so sorry.

This is where I know you haven't read him, but for me, I just recently read a lot of Gramsci's prison notebooks.

And his stuff on cultural hegemony is so huge, because one of the things that he studied was how come the Russians were able to have a revolution that transferred into socialism and communism, whereas in Italy it went to fascism.

And why the other European nations?

The thing that he came to was cultural hegemony, because this is the power.

And he talked about two different versions of revolutionary forces.

One was of maneuver and the other one was of position.

And he talked about how the one that was, I believe it was maneuvers, was the revolution, violent revolution.

And violent revolution, he said, didn't even guarantee that you would have the kind of outcome you would like, because ultimately you would recreate the same hierarchies and the same issues if you hadn't changed hearts and minds.

And the other one, which was More reformist, unfortunately, took longer, but it had the ability to change hearts and minds.

But it focused on what I think a lot of people today try to do, which is, hey, maybe we can change the oligarchs mind to how they want to do things.

I think that's important insights.

I'm sorry, for those that know this better than I, I butchered the maneuver.

These were big to me.

The concept of basically reformer revolution, he had two different words for that.

And I'm still getting my feet wet in this stuff.

So I'm not like trying to be a theorist here.

I just found it to be fascinating and didn't mean to throw you off, but I just felt like that was really important to understand.

Just because you have a revolution doesn't guarantee you're going to get the outcome you wanted.

And history proves that.

That's right.

I mean, the French Revolution, I think is a good example of that as well.

So the one thing that Randy and I were just talking today about, working on is this whole uproar over the Fed independence, which I think you have all this knee jerk reactions from Democrats in particular, but you could also say, people on the left, that just because Trump said something, then it's gotta be wrong.

A lot of Trump's critique is borrowed from leftist critiques of the system.

Trump's stance on trade.

Bernie Sanders, I'm sure, was saying the same thing in the 1990s, like the whole thing about NAFTA and so on, globalization and how the US Is on the losing side of it, whether you agree or disagree with it.

But the point is that a lot of it is borrowed from the left and is playing to people's real fears about their economic situation.

So then the same thing is happening when Trump is attacking the Federal Reserve.

Oh my God.

The sacredness of Fed independence.

Independence from who?

That's from Congress.

Should the Fed really be independent from Congress?

Should Congress not be able to tell the Fed that, hey, you cannot raise interest rates to 10%, something like that, so that somebody like another Paul Volcker could come in and raise interest rates to 22% under the guise of, oh, we're just controlling money supply?

Just this knee jerk defense of institutions just because Trump is attacking them.

I think that's a problem.

So we are probably going to write something about that.

The Fed independence story.

I think that's absolutely fantastic because I do find it interesting.

I mean, he just recently is trying to send shares of intel, right, so that we can get the revenue.

Ben Norton came out and said this and it drove me crazy because while I'm very much in favor of nationalizing and I don't want a robust private sector, I want a robust public sector, but I want it serving we the people, not the oligarchs.

And the idea of the government being cash strapped and cash poured and going to benefit from the stock market here is preposterous.

It just doesn't make any sense to me.

And they're not lining it up like, oh, we're going to take our 10% cut as a tax and just purge reserves in the system.

They're acting like the government is cash poor and this feeds into that sovereign wealth fund.

So if you take the money that comes from this, now all of a sudden these oligarchs have a slush fund to do with whatever they want.

Beyond the realm of Article Section 8 in the Constitution and the power of Congress, does this not, in essence, violate that kind of sacrosanct constitutional mandate of who controls the perth?

The lessons I draw from the whole intel thing is actually, again, another example of this whole knee jerk opposition to what Trump did.

As I told you before we started a podcast, I've been on a news diet, so I have not been following it very closely.

Smart.

Well, I was abroad, so that was a good opportunity.

But all I saw was that the government's taking a 10% stake in Intel.

I didn't even see that they're doing it because they're cash strapped, which would be ridiculous.

But then you have people on the left criticizing a move like that.

And I'm thinking, why are you criticizing the move itself?

Like you can criticize the motives.

Right?

Right.

But the government taking a stake in a company because of public interest or national security interests and so on, that can be a left wing idea as well.

Right.

So it can be done.

Nationalize.

Yes, exactly.

It's nationalizing an entity, for instance.

So then you're going to say, oh, this is bad.

So then next time if you have to do it, then you're being hypocritical, you're not being consistent.

So it goes back to what we're talking about with interest rates.

When they're high, you can't spend.

When they're low, you can.

Or the thing about deficits, Right.

When it's spending, that's driving the deficits, that's okay.

When it's tax cuts, that's not okay.

So you have to be consistent.

You have to have a consistent framework for evaluating the economy and a consistent framework for your politics, whether you like the person Doing it or not.

That's right.

So in that sense, and I want to just leave this final answer, the idea of nationalizing all these companies, to me, do it 100%.

I'm not interested in 10.

That's me.

That's my value system.

I would rather nationalize them.

But the idea, though, that the government requires money.

Yeah.

And that it requires a sovereign wealth fund and that it requires bitcoin, all that is pretty ridiculous on its face.

It's one thing to celebrate nationalizing, because that's a total different thing.

That's about public ownership now.

But to talk about revenue and to talk about, hey, it's good that the government will be able to benefit from those dollars.

No.

How so?

Unless they are taxing them and deleting the reserves in the system.

Help me understand.

I don't get it.

I mean, I still don't get it.

I would need to understand more.

But the idea of that sovereign wealth fund, once again, it looks like just a rich person slush fund.

It doesn't look like a substantive way of dealing with economic issues.

A sovereign wealth fund may make sense for a country, like a developing country, that has dollars.

Yes.

And wants to invest its dollars and earn more dollars because they need the foreign currency reserves.

Yes.

When you're doing the sovereign wealth fund in your own currency, that just makes zero sense.

Like years ago, I remember I was giving a talk for a German audience because their government was trying to do the same thing.

Take some of their taxpayer money and create a sovereign wealth fund tied to pensions in particular, and tried to invest it even in the US Stock market.

I was thinking, this is such a crazy idea.

Why would you want to do that?

If you need more money to pay your pensioners down the line, you just create more and you do it right.

You don't need a wealth fund for that.

Again, it all goes back to the wrong framework, misunderstanding the government's role in its own monetary system.

That a wealth fund in your own currency makes absolutely no sense.

Yes.

And of course, the whole Bitcoin strategic reserve thing, that's also crazy as well.

Right.

So countries have foreign currency reserves for a reason, because they need the dollars for a variety of reasons, such as to service debt to pay for imports.

Right?

That's right.

And so on and so forth to maintain their exchange rates and stability.

What are you doing with a bitcoin reserve?

It makes zero sense.

The only thing it does is, of course, it inflates bitcoin prices and it drives speculation in cryptocurrencies, which we are obviously dealing with right now.

Yeah, thank you very much for taking me down this path.

This is really fun.

All right, so do you have more writing coming up?

You and Randy doing anything?

You got something of your own or are we in a lull here coming back from Europe?

Bit of a lull over the summer, but yeah, I have a couple of projects where one is actually on interest rates, just reiterating the MMT idea that interest on government bonds is not market determined.

It's set by the central bank, it's related to the downgrade and how long term interest rates are supposedly skyrocketing and all of that.

I do have another paper which I will hopefully finish soon on Europe actually, because the Eurozone in particular is just such a good case study of where austerity takes you.

And of course now they want to do a bit of military Keynesianism as a way to take their economies out of the rut that they have been in for the past 15 years or so.

And you do notice a significant decline in the standard of living of Europeans relative to the US that I think was not so visible, let's say 10, 15 years ago.

So I think the global financial crisis has really put them on a different trajectory.

And so that's what my other paper is about.

Well, I look forward to both and hopefully I can have you back on to talk about that in the future because you are one of my favorite guests.

I appreciate your patience and willingness to listen to Grumbine ramble.

And my last little piece here.

A lot of people really get hell bent, especially within the MMT side that, oh my God, Steve, you're mixing ideology with mmt.

And I'm saying, well, I'm not an economist number one, but number two, I'm trying to speak to people that want these things to happen.

And when I tell you, oh guys, the capacity of the currency issuing federal government could do xyz.

And then I don't have any ideological framework by which to say, hey, but I'm here to tell you I'm with you.

And this is stuff that matters to you that you don't know matters to you yet is this MMT stuff.

I'm here to bring both to you, baby on a silver platter.

And they get really upset and it's like, oh, well, I don't like mixing ideology with my mmt.

And I'm like, I get it in a textbook form.

I wouldn't neither.

But I'm not a textbook.

I'm a human being that lives in this world And I'm trying to make other human beings that live in this world care about mmt.

And MMT only matters when they understand how it relates to them and the things that matter to them.

So two tears in a bucket.

I got something that rhymes with it.

You know, I'm going to keep going with that mindset because I think it's really important for regular people.

And hopefully MMT start realizing, hey, just because we're talking about artificial intelligence doesn't mean that we're not using that with an MMT lens to evaluate the impacts of it and what could be done differently or what's being done and so forth.

It's important that people hear the things that they're focused on and find the MMT story in it as well.

And I hope that we're doing a decent job with that.

I'm not claiming I'm great.

I'm just claiming I'm trying.

So hopefully we're doing okay.

That's all we can do, Ray.

Try.

That's it.

That's it.

Okay.

All right, well, I'm going to take us out now, Jeva.

Thank you so much for joining me today, folks.

My name is Steve Grumbine.

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