>>Conceptually the answer in the theory is to suck up the excess money with taxes
Govt spending is already 45% of GDP, so there's not much room to increase it more.
As for MMT, I think what the MMT crowd doesn't realize is that there's a lot of latent inflation coming. Asset prices and CPI do not go up in tandem. First Asset prices are inflated, then later for the next decade or so, as people slowly make withdrawals from those inflated asset prices, it begins to affect the CPI. And that's where we are right now, at the beginning of the CPI impact.
I am by no means a fan of mmt, but I think looking at government spending as a share of GDP misses the point mmt proponents attempt and often fail to make; which is that financial constraints are should not be the limiting factor of the economy.
A better indicator would be the price of labor and commodities since they better reflect the constraints of the real economy. Unfortunately for the mmt people, the prices are going nuts because we are actually dealing with real resource constraints now.
As I understand it taxes in MMT are just destruction of money, it's the essential counterpart of money creation used to balance supply. It's irrelevant to GDP and spending in that model, since in MMT the government doesn't need taxes to spend, it just print what it needs, that's the core idea.
Interestingly, the mechanics of this seem backward. A major problem with the Fed's operations is that operations on financial markets take 12-18 months to spread to the real economy, so they have to target interest rates now based on what they think the economy is going to look like in 12-18 months. Conversely, money going into or out of the average person's checking account now affects what they do in the real economy now, without a lag time. When we've recovered from significant economic crises (2008 and 2020), it's often been through direct fiscal stimulus.
It seems that the logical thing to do would be to put money into the economy through directly giving it to citizens, and then take money out of the economy through interest rates, by making it more expensive to borrow and reducing business investment. Typically you want to put money into the economy in a hurry, in response to a crisis, but you want to take it out gradually, so that businesses can plan ahead. MMT's framing of this still seems backwards, even if they've realized that fiscal and monetary policy are two sides of the same coin. You'd also get a lot less political resistance to the fiscal policy side if it involved giving people money rather taking money away from them.
I seem to recall that France used to do this -- create money for government spending, taxed money ceases to exist, no need for government debt. But I can't find anything about it, and I don't know if I'm just not using the right search terms.
Has this been put into practice in large countries before?
This points to why the EU will likely disintegrate - member countries can't print to monetize country debt. Either EU members split out to regain currency autonomy, or EU officially federalizes member country debt.
Obviously the latter will happen - it is in fact already happening, between eurobonds and recovery fund. We just don't make a big song and dance about it - quiet work is how the EU is managing to do the unthinkable of federating this anarchic and unruly continent.
The economic imbalances between EU states are nothing, compared to the ones between US states. Do you see the US "disintegrating" anytime soon?
I could see Illinois imploding due to retiree obligations and pieces of Illinois being absorbed by neighbor States. More likely for federal government to take over State pensions because federal government can emit unbacked money.
I can think of a few trillion in urgently needed money we could spend taxes on: renewable energy, batteries, retrofitting homes for chargers, resilience building (and paying people to move out of high risk areas), invest in carbon capture/moonshots.
Personally, I'd love to just get rid of most or at least part of my lawn and replace with growing food, like Rob Greenfield. anyone interested in turning their lawn into a food growing yard, should check out his work: https://www.robgreenfield.org/
I sympothize with the poster but the headline is potentially misleading.
I don't think the article really qualifies her status as a healthy lifestyle individual. I'm sure she may think she leads a very healthy lifestyle but there are a lot of misconceptions out there, when it comes to health. What exacerbates it is, once people learn that some things are not healthy, they switch to alternatives without understanding that the alternatives their going to are just as bad.
I know I'm going to get downvoted severly for what I'm going to post, but the truth must come out. These are all things which people generally believe are healthy but there is ample evidence out there and talk to nutritionistal scientists and they'll tell you, the following are not necessarily healthy:
- eating dairy and meat (both of these can be quite carcinogenic, lots of research proves this) - even fat free dairy, even fat free meat -> check out the china study, it's quite comprehensive and enlightening, study the blue zones
- excercising, running more than 20 miles per week is actually detrimental to your health (surprising i know)
- eating more than 2 meals a day
- the list of foods that market themselves as healthy but are not, is extremely long: certain cereals, to granola bars, etc
- non dairy creamers - sorry, but these things are loaded with partially hydrogenated oils, aka trans fats. trans fats are so bad, they've been made illegal but companies can get away with putting them in products by printing 0g of trans fat on the label becuase they're allowed to round down from 0.5g to 0. You might not think that's a big deal but they make the serving size super small, so 0.5 easily becomes 1 to 2g. even 2g of trans fat is enough to make a health difference.
- high protein diet can speed up MTOR production, IGF-1 levels and increase cancer risk. research has shown it's only the over 65 yr crowd that really need high protein diets for good health because their IGF-1 levels are already to low.
- Oils are NOT good for you, EVEEEN if their canola oil, extra virgin olive oil. All those mediterarean diets that show better health outcomes, do so "inspite of olive oil", not because of it. Scientists have observed the impact of olive oil up close, and they will tell you, you're endothelial cells which line your arteries do NOT like Olive oil or any other kind of oil running through your system.
- Not to mention, most people vastly underestimate their junk food intake because it's density is so much greater. I mean, if you eat 1/4 of your plate with cookies, your diet isn't 25% junk. it's actually more like 90% because cookies 12 times more calorie dense than vegetables and fruits.
- A salad with ranch dressing on it, you'd think would be healthy but look: the 2 TBS of ranch are 240 cals and the salad is like 20 cals, so your meal is mostly just oil and sugar. And yes, it's the calorie which is the unit of account: nutrition researchers use it, and your stomach uses it to determine your fullness (satiety is yet another completely misunderstood concept )
- It is VERY EASY to underestimate the amount of saturated fat you're consuming. The WHO recommends no more than 5% of your diet from Saturated fats which is about 11g. it's not commonly known but super provable from the USDA's own database, that saturated fats are present even in healthy foods but it's the right amount. even, in your rolled oats, and your spinach and your veggies there's some saturated fat, but it's not much. but you're already getting 5g a day just from the super healthy foods, so it's very easy to go over that 11g limit.
You list a lot of things that aren't healthy. Can you give an example of a typical 2 meal day that doesn't include oils, fat, meat, dairy, or whatever else isn't healthy? I'm genuinely curious.
You'd have to stick with vegetables and fruits, but even then there's debate over what is truly healthy. Is corn healthy? Is wheat healthy? Are carrots healthy? They're all plants after all, however... All three are high in carbohydrates and would be considered "unhealthy" from a keto-perspective.
The best bet here: don't listen to one source of information. There are literally thousands of experts on diet, health, and nutrition, no one of them is totally correct. Find what you can tolerate, what you can stick to; eat mostly plants, and not too much.
One NY times article stated: "Just eat food". As a general rule of thumb, they stated, if your great grandmother doesn't recognize it as food, it probably isn't.
The primary food groups are:
- Beans
- Whole Grains
- Fruits
- Vegetables
the two secondary groups are:
- Nuts
- Seeds
And, you can eat some oil and sugar, just make sure it's not a vast amount. Know that anything in a wrapper or box or plastic bag that was made in a factory is roughly 50% oil. With Sat Fat, gotta be much more careful because it takes very little to go over in that category.
People always wonder what's so special about these foods (beans, whole grains, fruits, vegies), why are they healthy? why can't we just eat cheeseburgers everyday. It's just that, the whole foods plant based diet is what our ancestors ate for millions of years. it's what our body has adapted to for millions of years.
When scientists followed the hazda tribe (an untouched people, who still mostly live the way our ancestors lived) through their native area, they found that they mainly just ate plants. they grazed all day long, going from bush to bush eating leafy green vegetables, the occassional fruits. Their 2 day meal plant consisted of grabbing whatever leafy greens they happened to find that day. Of course, they're expert foragers and know what to eat. It may not seem like a varied diet but, there are over 80,000 edible plant species in the world. You likely have over a dozen growing in your backyard if you know what they look like: Dandelions, Dock, american willoherb, holleycock, mallow, wood sorrel, miners lettuce, nasturiums, etc.
Simply put, the diet that most closely mimics the foods that humans evolved to eat, are the ones that cause the least amount of health issues.
If you don't like eating greens all day, here's another idea:
2 Meal day:
Breakfast: Cacao powder with hot water and 1 TSP of soymilk or oatmilk*
Lunch: Oatmeal, 2 mangos
Dinner: Cabbage soup: carrots, tomatoes, cabbage with spices and beans,
Steamed Broccoli. a piece of whole wheat bread, and for dessert: some high fiber cereal with a little bit of soymilk and honey on top. (Yum!)
breakfast: cacao powder with hot water and soymilk.
Lunch: Juiced greens from the garden (whatever's growing that's edible), an apple, pear, couple of almonds, Lentil soup
Dinner: Garden salad with nuts, brown rice, tofu and tomato dish
dessert: chia seed pudding with soymilk and cinnamon.
*(Oatmilk - this is another one of those alternative health foods to watch out for: alot of these things are filled with oil and sugar. they say 2% oil but that's by weight, not calories, so vastly misleading). check the ingredient labels. Soemtimes, You can reverse engineer the real ingredient breakdown by calculating the % of fat or sat fat listed on the label vs the % of fat found in rolled oats.
Most people don't have time to eat greens 10 hours a day like the hazda do, so we have to rely on Beans and Whole Grains, nuts and seeds and fruits for most of our calories.
Just skimming over your 2 meal day idea, it involves meal 1, meal 2, meal 3, meal 4. That seems a bit confusing to your don't eat more than 2 meals a day.
Here's my reaction:
If google wants me in the office, then fine, I'll just arrive an hour later and leave an hour earlier ~ the length of the average commute. It's obvious that the company values seat time in the office more than 25% extra productivity. Google chose to put their offices in the least accessible areas of the country and there is a price to pay for that. Either you pay higher salaries or put up with less producitivity.
It just reminds of those articles from the 99s when companies hired people to be in the office right before the dot com bust.
Govt spending is already 45% of GDP, so there's not much room to increase it more.
As for MMT, I think what the MMT crowd doesn't realize is that there's a lot of latent inflation coming. Asset prices and CPI do not go up in tandem. First Asset prices are inflated, then later for the next decade or so, as people slowly make withdrawals from those inflated asset prices, it begins to affect the CPI. And that's where we are right now, at the beginning of the CPI impact.