Episode 324 – Modern Money Awakenings with Tracy Carson

Steve Grumbine:
00:00:43

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s interview is actually one that I did with a wonderful, wonderful woman named Tracy Carson. She had heard of Modern Monetary Theory. She had considered Modern Monetary Theory, but ultimately she did something most people don’t do.

She thought, “Hey, why not reach out to somebody who actually understands Modern Monetary Theory and find out from them and see if they can answer my questions?”

So this interview, this discussion with Tracy was definitely a friendly conversation, a conversation that maybe many of you could have with friends at different times. Obviously, we know how tough it is to have these conversations on social media.

There are very few that don’t come into these conversations as a full cup, ready to fight. But for those who genuinely are seeking and are interested in the conversation, these are the moments you live for.

These are the moments you’re excited to engage. And Tracy Carson was just a wonderful, wonderful host. She asked great questions and she was willing to hear the answers.

And that makes her one of my favorite people. Here we go.

Tracy Carson:
00:02:02

Hi, everybody. I am so glad to be with you all this afternoon. I hope your day is going well.

I’m going to let my guest introduce himself because I have a ton of questions.

Steve Grumbine:
00:02:16

Let’s go. All right, so I’m Steve Grumbine. I’m the founder of Real Progressives organization, has been in existence for about 10 years.

I’m a proponent of Modern Monetary Theory and I have recently shifted some of my focus to blending Modern Monetary Theory with a class analysis to help leftists understand Modern Monetary Theory and why it matters to them.

Tracy Carson:
00:02:40

Okay, I’m going to tell you what I think I understand about Modern Monetary Theory or MMT. I’m just going to go with MMT. The federal government can pretty much generate money out of  thin air.

Steve Grumbine:
00:02:53

It does. It’s the only way it works. Yes.

Tracy Carson:
00:02:56

Okay, so I got that part right. Basically, that’s pretty much where I’m at in terms of my understanding.

Steve Grumbine:
00:03:03

So let me take you on a mid-range drive. There are currency issuers and there are currency users. This is the key insight to MMT.

We understand that you’re either the currency issuer, you have the power over the currency or, or you’re the user of the currency. Okay. In the case of the United States, we have a US Constitution that says… Article 1, Section 8 says the power of the purse belongs to Congress.

So Congress alone can levy taxes, Congress alone can spend money into existence. And what it does is it writes a law. And that law then in turn generates instructions.

Those instructions are then given to the nation’s central bank, the Fed [Federal Reserve], who then keystrokes dollars into the Treasury’s bank account and the treasury then spends that money into existence wherever the bill.

You know, we have Medicare for All, going to send checks to doctors, we have Social Security, we’re going to go ahead and send checks to retirees or people on disability or death survivors, et cetera. So ultimately the federal government is the currency issuer and by law it created the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve.

Now I know there’s, oh God, a lot of conspiracy theories and long-winded tales from the fire pit that people talk about. And I’m not here to defend the Fed.

The Fed and the people that run our government are not people that I would want to run the Fed or run the federal government. There are ideological reasons for that. But MMT is not ideological. MMT is just this is how we do things, this is how it works.

So by spending the money into existence, the government doesn’t have a stack in the bank pallets with printed dollars, doesn’t have any of that stuff. What it does is it spends the money into existence and then, so we don’t just have money piling up everywhere.

The government then in turn taxes some of it out of existence. It deletes it, it’s gone. Never to be re-spent, never to be seen again. Think of it like Sbarro’s, the Italian eatery.

They have 50 cent coupons, they give them out to everybody. Do you think Sbarro’s is gonna go bankrupt if it doesn’t receive 50 cent coupons? No, it’s not. It created the coupons.

Federal government doesn’t go bankrupt because it needs your tax dollars. What it does is it needs you to need its dollar.

By imposing a tax on that dollar, you now in turn need to do something to get that dollar so you can pay your taxes. That debt relationship that says, “Hey, you’re going to need to pay taxes.”

You can’t pay those taxes in Bitcoin, you can’t pay those taxes in chicken legs, you can’t pay those taxes in coupons. You can only pay taxes in US Dollars because the government’s purpose of collecting dollars is not for funding.

It’s so that you need those dollars and it uses it as a way of controlling inflation. If they raise taxes higher, it’s austerity. Your dollar doesn’t go as far. If they go ahead and they lower taxes now we have more money.

But what do we see during COVID? We saw that the businesses out there said, “Ah, they’ve got money, let’s raise prices.” Okay? That’s not the way it has to be.

But in a free market economy where the government is laissez faire and it doesn’t control costs, it doesn’t control capital, it doesn’t control any of that stuff, we saw what capital does to labor. That’s really the essence of it.

MMT is a domestic currency that is traded around the world, has nothing to do with the government’s ability to buy and sell things that are available in US dollars. So all this faith in the dollar stuff is standard libertarian logic that doesn’t really hold up.

As long as something is for sale in US dollars, our federal government can purchase them. That’s it.

Tracy Carson:
00:06:39

I was almost there. I was like, you had me right up until you got to the taxes portion.

Because again, I’m really new to this and I want to do this for all of the people who said I talked about MMT and somebody was like, “What is it?”

So if I’m understanding this right, it sounds to me like the government is making me pay taxes, the federal government, not state government, for no reason, like, they don’t have to tax me.

Steve Grumbine:
00:07:05

Well, they do need to. Because only reason why our dollar is worth anything is because it’s able to solve the tax problem.

This is the way it is everywhere in the world, right? This is the way it is in China, it’s the way it is in Australia, it’s the way it is in Canada, it’s the way it is in the UK. Same everywhere.

It’s even the same in the Eurozone. Even though they don’t have their own central bank for their own countries, the folks that are on the Euro are kind of like states in the US.

They don’t have the power to create currency, only the Troika, the European Central bank does, which is not a national bank in that case, right? So they in turn spend money into existence the same way. But the Troika, which is the central authority on their dollar, sets the rules.

And you’ll see right now Europe has started to loosen its restrictions on deficits because they want to militarize all of a sudden, now that Trump pulled back military support, Europe is having to militarize. They’re suddenly taking on a neocon perspective and they’ve dropped any kind of deficit constraints and said, “Spend, spend, spend. Just get your military built up.”

It’s a terrible thing, but it is the way it is.

Tracy Carson:
00:08:10

Okay, I’m getting closer. I’m really trying here. I’m like, okay, so in essence, the government could pay to fund any war.

Steve Grumbine:
00:08:18

Any war.

Tracy Carson:
00:08:19

We don’t like war. We’re morally opposed to war. They could fund Medicare for All, Reparations.

Steve Grumbine:
00:08:25

Yep.

Tracy Carson:
00:08:26

$2,000 a month checks to every American, right?

Steve Grumbine:
00:08:31

They could. They could.

Tracy Carson:
00:08:32

Yes. So the black delegation, because I know I have black supporters, thank you very much. We’ve been knowing this, right?

We have always said that the government does what it wants to do.

Steve Grumbine:
00:08:42

Yeah.

Tracy Carson:
00:08:43

And this is a perfect example of the government literally doing what it wants to do.

If it wanted to solve all of these problems that we have, we should technically not even have homelessness because we could just spend money to correct it.

Steve Grumbine:
00:08:58

Let me just fix one thing, because this is where a lot of people say, “Well, Steve, you didn’t tell them all the gotchas in there, right?” The gotchas are you got to have the real resources to purchase.

Because if you just spend money without the real resources available, you set the conditions for inflation and you don’t give people what they needed. Right? So, for example, hypothetically, we say, “We’re giving everybody. Forget Medicare for All.

It’s a trash program. Make it National Health Service for all, where we just go in and we get served. Period. Right? No problem.

If you don’t have enough doctors, if you don’t have enough nurses, if you don’t have enough gurneys or phlebotomists or, you know, heart surgeons or whatever, you’re going to run into problems. There’s not enough real resources, so you need to build up the resources for whatever you’re going to do.

And this is one of the few times I’ll tip my hat to Biden, which is almost a non-existent thing, but he created this Chips Act.

And what they did was they recognized that buying these chips for computers and all that stuff abroad when there was supply chain breakdowns put us into a major problem. We didn’t have the ability. We didn’t have the real resources.

So we needed to bring production of those chips home so that we didn’t have that kind of national security issue, number one, and didn’t allow others to gouge us, number two. But in reality, it’s all about preparation. Right?

So when people hear, “You’re just printing money” or “You’re just spending money,” “You just, you know, blowing money,” whatever “We got to save money,” it’s really a lie. It’s not a real thing. But what is real is real resources. If those real resources aren’t available, then you’re going to have real problems.

I’ll give you another example. I have horrible teeth. I’m missing almost all of my molars right now. I barely have any bite at all back there.

And part of the reason is that I didn’t have the money or coverage to get dental work done. But there’s a lot of people like me. I’m finding out. I’m finding a lot of people have all these luxury bones missing in their mouth. Right?

So what happens if suddenly all of us have the ability to go get our teeth fixed right away? Like suddenly they give universal dental care. Boom, done. You already know there’s going to be lines.

You’re going to be waiting six months for service because they didn’t prepare for it. They didn’t get enough dentists out there. They don’t have enough access to the real resource, to the services that we need.

It’s sort of like when you think about water, drinking water, potable drinking water. What happens if all the water’s poisoned and you only have a small area where you can get clean drinking water? That’s a real resource constraint.

Let’s say there’s big fires that sweep through the forests and there’s not enough lumber. You can have real resource constraint on lumber now. So you can’t build houses for everybody if you don’t have the real resources.

So it’s important to understand that, yes, there’s no financial constraint for the federal government. The federal government is the currency issuer. If that has laws passed that can make those things happen, then it can happen.

However, if you don’t have the real resources, it doesn’t matter how much money you have. Okay? So that’s important to understand.

And that’s also a trick of capital to control the supply, pumping out oil, which might be a good thing for climate crisis, but might be a bad thing in terms of the cost of fuel, which we all depend on for heating our homes and getting around in vehicles or whatever. So it’s always about real resources. There’s no financial constraint, though. That’s the key.

Tracy Carson:
00:12:12

Right. And here’s another thing I think I understand. So when I’m paying my taxes at the state level, because the state, Indiana can’t print money.

Steve Grumbine:
00:12:21

It’s a currency user.

Tracy Carson:
00:12:23

Yes, Right. So when they’re taking out taxes, it’s building my roads, paying my teachers, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

The federal government, if I’m understanding right, doesn’t have that restraint.

Steve Grumbine:
00:12:35

That’s correct.

Tracy Carson:
00:12:36

Okay, so now I got that part. Here comes my next question. Why do I always hear politicians, especially presidents, talk about reducing the deficit? That’s the part that just.

I’m like, okay, that’s not making sense because they’re saying, you know, “we have $39 trillion in,” whatever number it is, they said “trillion dollars in debt.” Could we just erase it?

Steve Grumbine:
00:13:00

Let me help you. It’s just so easy, it’s not even funny, right?

The government, statutes wise, [by policy] says that every time we spend money into the economy, okay, we got to offset those with treasury bills. We got to sell treasuries out there. It happens after we’ve spent the money, it could be completely done away with.

There’s no reason for us to sell bonds whatsoever. Because really what bonds end up being is free money to rich people, okay? That’s all they end up being is free money to rich people. It’s like payola.

Hey, we want to do this thing over here. Well, you can’t do it if you don’t pay us our, whatever you want to call it, man. It’s like they’re holding you hostage for it.

But we don’t have to do that. However, there’s another angle here. When China sells goods and services into the US and let’s be fair, we buy an awful lot of stuff from China, okay?

Tracy Carson:
00:13:47

We make nothing.

Steve Grumbine:
00:13:49

China gets a US dollar, a bunch of US Dollars. What the hell does China do with US Dollars? China is three times the size of our population, maybe more, maybe five times six.

Huge compared to us, right? They have got resources, natural resources out the wazoo. They got productive capacity you never even dreamed of, okay? China doesn’t need US Dollars.

The only reason they would have US Dollars is to help facilitate transactions between the two countries. It doesn’t require them. It uses the Yuan. Yuan, or Renminbi, is the Chinese currency. They don’t care about our dollar, really. Okay?

So what they’ll do is they will buy treasury bonds. They will buy bonds with their dollars that they receive from selling goods and services into our country.

Because you can’t buy treasury bonds with any other currency other than US Dollars, okay? So it’s not really debt in the way that you think of debt. It’s really more like a savings account at your bank.

Your bank doesn’t freak out that we’ve got too many people with savings accounts. They don’t think about that. They don’t care about that, nor should you or I.

What the debt amounts to is the government’s red ink is our black ink because it’s like split in the middle. Double-entry accounting. You have two sides of the ledger. You have assets and liabilities. Well, the government’s the currency issuer.

So when it spends money in that liability, they’re saying, we will accept $1 from you for $1 in tax. And when the tax is paid, it’s wiped out, it’s gone, it’s deleted, doesn’t exist anymore.

So ultimately, the national debt is the sum total of every dollar and treasury in the economy that has not yet been taxed back. So think of it as the net money supply.

This is straight from Warren Mosler, who may have some bad political angles, but he really does understand the very essence of the system. He’s the author, if you will, of Modern Monetary Theory.

I do not agree with his politics at all, but I do agree he is the guru, if you will, of understanding the system.

Tracy Carson:
00:15:47

You got me like there, I’m like 70% there. But this deficit thing is really getting in my head.

Because what I don’t understand is when I hear we had to reduce the deficit, we had to cut spending. That logic doesn’t make sense to me.

Steve Grumbine:
00:16:02

You’re about to enter into a leftist framework that I’m just going to make very clear, okay? The fact is our government is captured by capital, okay? It has been. A study by Princeton showed that we are an oligarchy. We are not a democracy.

So any pretense that we’re going to save our democracy is horse hockey. With that in mind, when you hear our government talking, they’re not representing you and I. They’re there to manufacture consent from you and I.

What they’re there to do is the master’s bidding, the oligarchy’s bidding, the people that donate to them bidding, their factions, okay? And so austerity is a tool to tame labor, to discipline the working class of America, okay?

And so what they do is they tell us, “Oh, we don’t have any money.” I mean, Obama said, “Hey, you know, we don’t have any money. We got to take out a credit card from the People’s Republic of China.

That’d be immoral, blah, blah, blah,” right? Famous line from him, Bubba: “We got to get this deficit down.” You know, all of them say the same thing. Why?

Because that money in the economy is what keeps us floating. Right?

When the government, as the employer of last resort, hires people that are otherwise not hired by the private sector, that is doing a great service to all of us. Because what happens to people who are unemployed? They become desperate. They do whatever they have to do to survive.

And sometimes that doesn’t involve treating us the best because ultimately, they’re just trying to survive the next day. Okay, you got homelessness, you got drug addiction, you got suicide. Suicide goes up some 20% when you have people that are unemployed.

It’s an unbelievable amount of self-hatred. That feeling of, “I can’t take care of my family.” The feeling of, “I’m not good enough, I’m a loser, I’m worthless.”

All this stuff comes from these messages that they send to us. And they send that to us to create, through cultural hegemony, to create a mindset that it’s on you if you win and it’s on you if you lose.

“There is no collective. There is no public money. There is only taxpayer dollars.” And what do you think of a taxpayer? Let’s be honest, this is the United States of America.

What do you think in this racist country? What do you think we think of when we talk about taxpayers? Do you think they’re talking about a homeless black person?

Do you think they’re talking about a trans person? No, they’re talking about a wealthy white person, goes, “Well, you’re not doing the right thing. We’ve got to put you in jail.”

It’s all the narratives baked into one policy of austerity. And so all the things you see there are them playing on your idea of a household budget.

You know, when you don’t have 50 bucks in the bank, you can’t spend 50 bucks. You go ahead and put it on a credit card, but you know you’re going to have to pay it later. Right?

So they play on all these mind games that you and I have to deal with, but we aren’t currency issuers, are we? We don’t create that money out of thin air.

Tracy Carson:
00:18:57

I’m so glad you brought that up, because I hear people say, you know, because I’m in contact with a lot of Trump supporters. I don’t know how that happened, but I am. That’s just my world. My range of contact goes from blue MAGA to red MAGA. I’m just all over the map.

And I hear people talk about, “Well, we should run America like a business.” And I’m like, “No, our government isn’t set up to make a profit. Our government is set up to defend us against harm.”

I know in theory it’s set up to defend us from dangerous overseas and internal. It’s set up to promote the common welfare. Now, does it do that? No, but that’s what it ideally should be set up for.

And when I hear this statement, which I’ve seen you enough on Status Coup to know it does what I call irks you, like, it’s just like. Like you just got to go off. When I hear this statement, “I don’t want my tax money to go to…”

And Social Security is the main one. Me telling people, “Well, you actually don’t pay into Social Security.” It’s like I’m saying the earth is flat. Definitely flat.

Steve Grumbine:
00:20:03

Let me jump in there, because this is such a big deal, right? So have you ever seen those rubber hoses in the road that they put out there to track how many cars have gone by a certain intersection?

They run a wire across the road, and every time trucks or cars run across, it ticks up. There’s another car. There’s another car. They do it for studies. They do it for all kinds of construction work and stuff.

Anyway, Social Security trust fund is kind of like this tracker. Tick, tick, tick. You put another buck in there, tick, tick, tick. But it’s not real because all taxes are deleted at the federal level.

All of them, including FICA [Federal Insurance Contributions Act]. Right? So way back when, when FDR started the Social Security program, he knew that most people would freak out if they thought it was a handout.

That’s the way they framed it. It would be a handout. So what he said was, “We’ll create this FICA thing.

We’ll create this trust fund thing that will track how much you pay in each year. And that way you’ll always feel entitled because you always believe it’s your money.” But in reality, there’s no 1919 ha’penny from granny in the trust fund.

It doesn’t work that way. It’s a spreadsheet, basically. Okay? And so we could, in fact, let me go back for a second. Paul Ryan.

Paul Ryan was interviewing Alan Greenspan on Capitol Hill about Social Security. And he asked, “Wouldn’t it be true to say that if we created personal retirement accounts, that it would make Social Security more solvent?”

In other words, privatize Social Security. And Alan Greenspan, who is not in any way, shape or form, one of us, he is a bad guy. Okay? He’s a bad, bad guy.

But Alan Greenspan said to him, “Well, that’s not true, because there’s nothing preventing the federal government from spending however much it wants on Social Security. The question is, (I couldn’t believe it.) Do we have an economy where the real resources are available for purchase? That’s the trick.

We can send them as much money as we want as long as there are the real resources.” So this has nothing to do with FICA.

There’s one key sentence inside the Social Security law that says the trust fund will have the authority to authorize payments. That doesn’t mean it pays it, because if you look at any Social Security check, it’s got the Treasury on it. It’s not coming from the trust fund.

It’s coming from the Treasury. Okay?

So when you think about it, what they’re doing is they said it has to be solvent within this trust fund, and the trust fund’s the only one that can give authority to make payments. It’s a bunch of BS. You put the aluminum foil hat on, you rub your belly, you stand on one leg, it’s got the same effect.

The only difference is it’s written in the law. So if you want to save Social Security, you eliminate that framing of authority to make payments.

And the trust fund, there’s no need for the trust fund whatsoever. In fact, there’s no need for FICA whatsoever. Eliminate FICA altogether. That should get your MAGA friends happy.

“Hey, we’ll stop taxing you FICA dollars. Would you like that? And we’ll raise it instead of only being however much. Maybe we make it $5,000 a month for retirees.

Wouldn’t that make for a nice retirement?” You know, and so ultimately it comes down to people don’t understand. So they’re like, “We gotta tax the billionaires.”

Well, whatever you tax for funding, in your mind, you have to keep in perpetuity because if they ever go away, you won’t have funding for your program. So that means you’re pitching your program to billionaires. You need billionaires to fund your programs.

Think about how really ludicrous and stupid that is. Just not only because that’s not how it works, but why would you want that, right? So the idea is, do it. Screw them, just do it.

Tracy Carson:
00:23:46

And you know, as a Leftist Leftist, I’ve always said that, “Look, tax the billionaires.” We should in theory. But then you just ask like, “What if they all leave?”

Steve Grumbine:
00:23:56

We don’t need their money. We don’t need their money. Here’s the thing that kills me, right? And Stephanie Kelton has a great tweet out there.

If you ever put the name Stephanie Kelton and Robin Hood into Google or into Twitter, you’ll find a tweet thread where she talks about, “I don’t want to wait around chasing gold coins in a fiat system looking for rich people money, when in fact we should just do what must be done. We don’t want to let the planet burn up. We don’t want to let people die in the streets.

Why not just do what we have to do and then we can worry about taxing them differently? Because taxes don’t fund any of these programs. And by tying a tax to a program, you immediately set the stage for a war. There’s no need for it.”

But I’ll get into another part of this. I don’t believe we can vote our way out of this to begin with.

That’s the other part of my Leftist thing right there, is that this is a bourgeois manifestation of consent manufacturing. We’re an oligarchy. We believe because that’s what we’ve been taught all our lives. And it’s scary to think, “Hey, we don’t really have a democracy.”

But the quicker we get to the point where we recognize we are in an oligarchy and we do not have a democracy, then we could start taking Fred Hampton up and we could start doing the things that we know need to be done. And we don’t do that because we’re scared. We’re terrified. I know I’m terrified. I’m older. It scares the heck out of me.

But I recognize that just because the placebo of voting makes us feel giddy. And I mean third parties, I mean 100th parties, I mean the duopoly. This system was built for wealthy white landowners.

The Constitution, every other document since then, has always been there to prop up private property, to prop up the goals and desires of the wealthy. We have always been an afterthought.

Even when we win some minor concession, it is always just very much manufacturing consent, very much a veneer of democracy, and very much not the way we’re going to ever lead a life without having all of our vanity bones missing from our mouth, right? These luxury bones.

So to me, the key here is: We believe, we fundamentally believe the government is there to serve us. And I love government. If we had a government for and by the people, I’d love it.

If we had a democracy where we actually all voted for things and we actually got to see the results of our votes matter, I would love it. That’s not how this works. It’s not real. And Princeton study has shown that.

And there’s millions of other studies that show that we are captured, our institutions are captured and so forth.

So when you hear DOGE, and you hear Musk and you hear Trump doing this, they’re playing on the right-wing foolishness that thinks it’s their “hard-earned tax dollars going over there and pay for that narrative. Good. And sat there and screwed around and got high and didn’t go to college, didn’t do no work, didn’t do this, that and the other.”

And they got this thing in their head and so they’re playing to that. And then worse, worse, Musk would like to privatize most of the government because he is a billionaire. And what would happen if it was privatized?

He’d become the first trillionaire. Right? He could use his PayPal as a payment system.

He could skip over, he could do all kinds of nonsense that would fatten the wallets of oligarchs instead of building for the public purpose, which we, you and I, I would imagine, would want. Right? All these things are like, if we make it easier on the people, then we’re going to make it harder on the capitalists.

They’re there to serve capital. They are not there to serve us. And that has to become clear in our brains. So we stop asking silly questions like, “Well, why won’t they do it?”

Well, they won’t do it because they don’t serve us. It doesn’t serve their interest.

Tracy Carson:
00:27:39

Wow, that was a whole lot.

Steve Grumbine:
00:27:41

Sorry.

Tracy Carson:
00:27:42

No, that’s okay. I always make this statement and you may not agree with it.

It seems like our public officials are hesitant to pay for things like SNAP [Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program] benefits, medical care, et cetera. But one thing that they always seem to find money for is war. I’m going to use broke because I’m just a common girl. That’s how I speak.

If we’re as broke as they say we are, we in a war. And because we’ve had so many of them, I get it confused. I get them all confused.

When we’re spending $300 million per day, where did that money come from? And I’m asking people this question and they’re like, “Well, it came from our tax.” No, you don’t have that amount.

There’s no way you could have that amount of tax money. I don’t care if they tax every single American 50 extra, there’s no way our money is ever going to pay for a $300 million a day war.

A day, not a week, not a year, every single day.

Steve Grumbine:
00:28:41

That’s right. Well, ask yourself the question, what are we going to war for real quick, right?

So you’ve got everybody with their Ukraine flag profile pictures, and they’re absolutely smitten with, “I stand with Ukraine”. Right?

What they don’t know is that the United States government has some 900 military bases around the world, many of which surround the entire perimeter of Russia. And what they don’t realize is that the United States is using NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization], has always used NATO. NATO has always been an extension of US Imperialism.

And what does the US Government need to do? The US Government needs to be able to get real resources from these countries because we don’t manufacture things here. So what do they do?

They destabilize. They create coups. They do whatever it takes to keep other countries in a place where they can be controlled by US interests.

Okay, so the US also uses something called the IMF or the International Monetary Fund. And what they do is they create loans to small countries, African countries, Global South countries in South America, you name it.

These countries are resource rich, but they don’t have the ability to produce refined products and services. They don’t have value-added services because they don’t have the productive capacity to build that real resource. So what do they do?

The IMF gives them a loan.

And that loan gives them a bunch of things called structural adjustments that forces each of those countries to do certain things like open their markets to US interests, open their markets to capitalism.

And then each of those countries, in order to pay the debt that they’ve now taken on from the IMF, sells their real goods and services on pennies on the dollar to the US or whoever just to pay their external foreign debt. Remember I told you the US Government can buy anything for sale in US dollars.

What they can’t do is run up foreign debt payable in a different currency. Okay, so these other countries don’t have it like the US. US has an “exorbitant privilege” of being the world’s reserve currency.

The primary, there’s a basket of them, but it is the primary one. So these countries have to do something to get US dollars. So what do they do?

They have to sell the things that matter most to them, their own food and stuff, instead of feeding their own people. They have to sell it to the US to get US Dollars to finance their foreign US Dollar-denominated debt.

I don’t know if this makes sense, but it’s like, let’s say I make Steve Bucks. You have Tracy Bucks, okay? But Steve Bucks are the big facility transactions all over the world.

Tracy Bucks are only good in Tracy’s little neck of the woods. And so you want to do good business with me because I make something you don’t have. And I say, well, you need US Dollars to buy it from me.

You’re like, “Well, how do I get US Dollars? We don’t have any US dollars.” So you might go in the forex market [foreign exchange market] and trade your currency in for whatever the exchange rate is to get US dollars.

But a lot of times you may not have enough to do that. And so what they do is they put you into debt peonage.

They put you in debt, they give you a US dollar-denominated loan that you now have to pay back with your real resources. And this is how the US has dominated the world. And the only way to do that is through militarism. Okay?

We had a guy on named John Perkins who wrote a book called Confessions of an Economic Hitman and what his job was, he would go to these countries, he would say, “I got a million dollars to you, Mr. Leader.
I will pay you a million as long as you make the world sweeter for my people back here. Or in the other hand, I’ve got a gun. You take your pick. You want the million or want to get killed?”

And so this is the way we do diplomacy around the world. We do it covertly through CIA, we do it through a number of ways. Okay? It used to be like, that’s so… it’s just conspiracy theory now.

It’s kind of wide out in the open, right? So when we think about war, war is another fascinating way of pumping money into the economy.

Because what they do, the federal government says, “We need 10,000 planes. We need 50 million bombs. We need all these things.” So the government then, just like I told you before, they pass a law, that law creates funds by sending instruction to the Fed.

The Fed then puts that money into the Treasury, who then spends it to those military contractors. And guess who gets it from the military contractors? The workers. The workers then spend that in the economy. All the military bases around the country.

That right there is what many of those communities survive on, is the military in their community buying and selling goods there. And then they, they did something super, super sneaky, tricky. They started building each little widget in all the different states of the country.

So if you cut the F-35 program or the whatever program, right, the seats are manufactured in Texas, the buttons are manufactured in Vermont, the whatever are manufactured. And so each state is like, “Nah, man, we need our money because then we’ll go crazy.” Because remember, states are not currency issuers.

A lot of, well-meaning people got on this band[wagon]. “We’re going to do health care state by state. We’re going to do this state by state. We’re going to do reparations state by state.”

You can’t do it that way. You can’t. You physically can’t do it. That’s why there’s a FEMA, federal emergency.

I mean, if you have tornadoes coming through and blowing up everywhere, the federal government is going to be the one that provides funds to rebuild the area, because there’s no way a state could do that. And it’s a slight sidebar, but I think it’ll play into the conversation about why war and why not this stuff, right?

When you think about states, states are in a race to the bottom. All of them are competing for how to get rich people into their state to get business into their state. And they’ll fight each other, they’ll,

“Hey, Texas will literally give you zero income tax down there. Come on down to Texas. We’re open for business.” Right?

Intermission:
00:34:18

You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast by Real Progressives. We are a 501c3 nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible. Please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon, Substack, or our website, realprogressives.org. Now back to the podcast.

Steve Grumbine:
00:34:49

And all those companies that are up in Detroit, Michigan and Buffalo and old Pittsburgh, back when the steel mills and all this stuff, they relocate. You look at what happened in Hershey, Pennsylvania, with the Hershey chocolate factory going to Mexico.

I mean, they leave whenever taxes go up, whenever the cost of doing business is too great, they leave.

And so anything that you would say, “I’m going to raise taxes at the state level to pay for something,” you are immediately creating the conditions for what Leftists would call capital flight. Because now capital is going to leave your state. Think about what schools are funded by. Schools are funded by zip code, by taxes, local taxes.

Okay, so if the rich leave your school district or they have school choice, what’s going to happen to the poor kids?

You’re going to be perpetuating poverty, you’re going to be perpetuating gentrification, you’re going to be perpetuating all these things that are very, very bad for society. So we get back to war.

You realize that in order to do this kind of American experiment where we are a net importer, where we don’t manufacture anything, we rely on the rest of the world, and the only way to keep people a slave is to keep them a slave, right? And that’s what we as a nation do, and we celebrate low prices coming from these other countries.

And now Donald Trump is literally slamming the door, putting tariffs on Canada, putting tariffs on Mexico, talking about putting tariffs on China, on and on and on. Because in his mind, this is going to bring manufacturing back home. Might be good, it might be bad, I don’t know. But think about this.

In an import nation like us, we give them a dollar for their goods and services. What do we care? We make those dollars out of thin air, right?

But when you look at what’s happening now, what’s happening now is you’ve got austerity, massive austerity to bring payroll down, to bring labor down in the US because we can’t compete with the rest of the world with the manufacturing costs and so forth. So they’ve got to make workers more unstable. They’ve got to reduce this stuff.

And because people are convinced that government is a waste, they don’t realize that all those DEI jobs were somebody getting a paycheck and then them spending it on their bread, their milk, their electric, their car, their whatever.

So all those local businesses that got traded by that person who you don’t like and you don’t think should have a job, that person was spending money in the economy keep you employed, too. So it’s a big ginormous system. Taxes are in this little loop over here.

They take money out of the economy and they literally create the conditions whether we’re going to have high inflation, low inflation, more buying power, less buying power. But spending is always separate from taxing. They don’t have any relationship to one another. So hopefully I didn’t, like, totally lose you there.

Tracy Carson:
00:37:35

I’m about 90% there now. I’m like, oh, okay. Because once it clicks, I got it. But I’m like, okay, 90% there, good. I want to talk about BRICS.

If you all don’t know about BRICS, it’s, I’m going to get these countries wrong: Brazil, Russia, India, China, Saudi Arabia and some other countries have gotten and said, “Screw you, U.S .economy. We’re going to, we’re going to just not use you anymore.” Did I get that right?

Steve Grumbine:
00:38:07

Not exactly, but close enough. What they’re doing is they’re creating a trading block, if you will. They’re creating a zone that doesn’t require the use of the U.S. SWIFT system.

Okay? The SWIFT system is how we were able to cut Russia off from all of its US dollar holdings. Okay?

So by pulling them back from that system, they’re able to transact with each other, without dealing with the US cutting them off, okay? Doesn’t really change anything for the US. They’re still going to do business with us.

And if they want to sell their goods and service into the US they’ll still need to use US Dollars to do it. Nothing changed there. The difference is, is that they’re taking away some of the tools of empire, which are the ability to sanction someone.

So the SWIFT system is the international payment system that the US owns, basically, the dollar system that we use. By getting out of there and transacting without including them, that is allowing them to have more autonomy and more freedom.

The problem is, and I’m a big fan of China, okay?

But there are those that would raise the specter of be careful not to build in the hierarchies that are over here on the US System into the BRICS system, because there’s still a lot of people out there that don’t understand money. And there’s a lot of those countries that are like, “We got to go on a gold standard. We got to do this.”

And ultimately, I know there’s people out there that don’t have a clue about economics that swear we need to go on a gold standard. It’d be the biggest suicidal thing we ever did in our lives. But there are still those countries out there. This is still forming, right?

One of the reasons why the US was able to dominate the way it did was after World War II, the rest of the world was pretty much blown up. They didn’t have manufacturing capacity. Their currencies were in the toilet. And so the U.S. government, because it was over here, you know, over there, over there, you know, kind of, we were over here. We didn’t get blown up, okay? So we had all this productive capacity.

We had a very stable currency, and we were able to become the hegemon of the world. All right?

In order for China to become that hegemon, they would need to really, really loosen the reins on their currency and start letting it matriculate out to the rest of the world. But they control theirs very tightly, okay? They need to really, really push it.

They would need to have like a Wall Street or something for people to begin wanting to invest. They would need to have all this stuff to create liquidity of their currency to overtake the dollar. That’s not going to happen, unfortunately.

I mean, I am thrilled to see an element of multipolarity happening, and BRICS are a wonderful first step. But I think too many leftists, you know, that don’t understand this stuff get super hyped up and excited. “Yeah, the end of the dollar, blah, blah.”

And it’s like, no, dude, no, it’s not.

Tracy Carson:
00:40:57

Because, see, that’s the way. And I guess because one, my understanding of the economy is based on basically this, like right here. That’s basically my under…

Like you asked me to explain Medicare for All. I could do it all day. “I’m like, okay, it works like this.” This, this what we’re talking about. It’s getting there. It’s getting there.

Steve Grumbine:
00:41:17

You want to do a fun exercise real quick because you say, you know Medicare, right? You know Medicare.

Tracy Carson:
00:41:22

No, Medicare for All.

Steve Grumbine:
00:41:23

Medicare for all, right, but so watch this. Okay? Medicare for all properly done, would eliminate the insurance companies. It would, it would eliminate those insurance companies.

Now if you look, and I don’t have those numbers and I haven’t cared enough to try to get those numbers, but if you look, there are millions of people employed by insurance companies. Okay?  [Yes.] So now all of a sudden, every bit of negative work they do, every bit of negative work that’s done creates GDP, It’s the gross domestic product, the gross national product. It’s the, the general ledger that says this is how much money the country has transacted. It. Okay?

You are cutting a huge amount of GDP out of the economy with all the service denial business that they’re in. Again, don’t worry about if it’s good or bad. Macroeconomics doesn’t care about morals here. Macroeconomics is just looking at aggregates. Okay?

Aggregates being all of that spending. Right? And so when you think about it, what do you think would be the appropriate tax for Medicare for All?

Tracy Carson:
00:42:26

Well, here’s what I would say. I’m going to answer that question by saying this.

If you look at the bill and I’m not going to call him “Sell out Sanders,” I said I was going to try to stop doing it. He said, “Hey, you know, when we go to this system, they just all kind of just move over. You know, we give them $50,000 and they train for the new system.” So there’s that provision. So it wouldn’t be like, okay, now everybody in the healthcare industry is unemployed.

Steve Grumbine:
00:42:56

Not everybody, right?

Tracy Carson:
00:42:57

Not everybody. This wouldn’t be a overnight. First of all, if it happens, one, I’m going to be like, “What? It actually happened?”

But it’s not going to be an overnight thing. It may take two years.

So these people will be learning the system and then eventually Aetna, Anthem, Humana, they would just go by the way of the storm. So I’ve always thought about it in that way.

Steve Grumbine:
00:43:24

Think about it like this, though. It’s not just the people employed. That’s great if they migrate over, whatever, okay?

But it’s all the other economic transactions that are happening with pharmaceutical companies and eliminating care. Because remember, on the Medicare for All side, it wouldn’t be in the eliminating of care business.

It would be in the approving of care business. Okay?

So hypothetically, you diminish a huge amount of GDP by cutting out all the negative externalities, all the marketing promotions and all the crap that they spend into the economy. That’s real people’s incomes. Even though it may be for bad causes, it’s still economic activity.

So what you have is recessionary or should say deflationary. It is recessionary, but it’s deflationary also.

So in order to really pass Medicare for All, because the average Berner and the average Bernie voice and the rest of them won’t ever say this, what you need is a tax cut for Medicare for All, not a tax increase to pay for. You need a tax cut. So show me one person out there, say, for the MMT folks that understands the economy well enough to say, “That’s deflationary.

We’re going to have a reduction in GDP. It requires a tax cut to be able to pull that off.” There’s no one out there that does it. Why?

Because they just think, “Oh, it’s a program, it’s going to be costly, and we got to raise taxes to pay for it.” And this is what the GOP thinks. This is what DOGE thinks. This is what Musk thinks. It’s what every libertarian thinks.

This is what most, sadly, sadly, most leftists think, okay? And that breaks my heart more than anything because the Left goes, “Thus sayeth the Marx, thus sayeth the Engels, thus sayeth the Communism.”

But what happens is, is when you go back to when Marx wrote Capital and Marx wrote all the treaties that most leftists hold dear, including myself, right? He didn’t know about fiat currency. He didn’t understand a fiat currency. So to him, it was gold standard logic. It was gold.

It was trading in commodities and things like that. And the first couple Chapters of Marx Volume 1 For Capital is nothing but talking about commodities and this wild exchange rate.

This is what most leftists live and die on, okay? Use value, like the entire thing is based on an understanding of commodities, when in reality a fiat currency doesn’t work that way.

We don’t go to a private bank to fund Medicare for All. What happens is the federal government speaks it into existence now, whether you want to.

“Well, the Federal Reserve’s. Only thing federal about”…  It is the nation’s central bank. And it was created by law by Congress. It’s a creature of Congress. It is controlled by Congress, whether they choose to exercise that control or not.

Okay? It is a creature of Congress. It’s not the other way around. We are not a creature of the Fed.

We, and I say we loosely because it ain’t we, because we don’t have a democracy. And I’m going to stand on that till the cows come home.

But if you understand that Medicare for All would be deflationary, it would be something requiring a tax cut. So this is why MMT isn’t just about
“We can print money.” MMT is really about understanding the way a fiat currency works.

It’s not some loosey-goosey way of saying, “We just spend to infinity.” No, if we’ve got full employment, real resources to tie it up, you can’t spend more unless you’ve got another way of producing without labor.

Maybe we need immigrant labor, maybe we need other things. Maybe we need automation, right? But what we’re seeing is a lot of jobs going away via automation.

And there isn’t the kind of creativity that’s creating new jobs.

And so we’re going to deal with a very, very unemployed society if we don’t worry about creating things like a Federal Job Guarantee, which is a core MMT component, providing everyone a job that wants a job payable by the federal government, administered at the local level.

Tracy Carson:
00:47:32

You would think the Republicans would be for that. Because I, back in the day, I did get SNAP benefits. They always say,
“People who get SNAP benefits, they don’t work. They just sit around and they just eat bonbons and they don’t do anything but drugs.” And you would think, okay, this party would be for a federal job for Chr[ist]… No, no. It’s like, do you hear yourself?

Steve Grumbine:
00:47:58

They think anything the government does is inherently wasteful. They think anything that the government spends on is inflationary.

They think they have a lot of things they think they think but just ain’t so, right? And so me as an MMT-informed leftist, right? What is the worst word I can say that’s PG? I don’t know.

Whatever it is, I have this guy who’s running around telling everybody that, “Steve Grumbine is an authoritarian Stalinist,” right? I explore all theory, all history, no matter where it leads me. I explore it because part of what we’re trying to do is undo the neoliberal order.

We’re trying to understand what works for working-class struggle. And yes, that would include looking at 1917 with the Bolsheviks. It would include looking at Mao [Zedong] It would include looking at Ho Chi Minh.

It would include looking at Fidel Castro. It would include looking at Fred Hampton. It would include all of these groups that have successfully brought about working-class revivals, okay?

Whether or not they did everything perfect is really not the important thing here. We need to find out the things that did work, skip things that didn’t work, and add our own value system to it.

And part of that for all lefties, even though most of them won’t hear this part of it, is to understand the way a fiat currency works. Because unless you’re willing to have a real, legitimate, violent revolution, you have got to find a way to work within the system at some level.

Now, I’m not talking about working within the system of Democrats, Republicans, Greens, this, that, and the other. I’m talking about you need to understand the way the monetary system works. And that is going to inform a lot of things.

Think about how many things you get wrong if you think that “The national debt is something we’re drowning in,” versus just the net money supply. How different is it when you think of the national debt really being our savings? Now, here’s where that one gets tricky, too.

Because it’s an aggregate, we don’t look at stratification. Stratification means power dynamics inside, you know, the income. Right? So when you look at income distribution in America, it’s sick, it’s perverse.

We are talking about the richest of the rich gaining money hand over fist every minute of every day. Some of them making more in 10 minutes than people making an entire year, okay? Many of them.

And so when you think about that, when you say, “The government’s red ink is our black ink”, well, it’s not our black ink. If it was run by socialists, if it was run by leftists, then maybe it would be our black ink, okay? But instead, it’s, it is our black ink.

And the more they cut on the government side, the less little people like you and I have, okay? But the rich get richer and they keep getting richer.

So it’s important to understand that taxes don’t fund programs, but taxes are a way, after the fact, of clawing back some of that inequality. I would prefer we did it on the front end so we don’t have to try and claw it back in taxes simply by spreading the wealth. But they don’t do that.

They don’t spend on the bottom, they don’t spend on us, the working class. They spend to the rich and let the rich trickle it down to us. And if it makes it to us, great.

But in reality that is what we’re dealing with and that’s both Democrats and that’s Republicans and sadly that ends up being Greens and anyone else that sadly thinks taxes fund spending.

Tracy Carson:
00:51:22

And that’s why I wanted to do this show because even I fell into that trap. I was like, “Well I’m paying into Social Security, it should be there.” And then I don’t know who told me about MMT. And they’re like, “You are so wrong.

You are so wrong.” And I don’t know who that person is, but thank you, because that’s the way if you talk to Joe Public, Jane Doe, that’s a propaganda tool, right?

How many times have we heard, “Well, my hard-earned tax dollars are paying for these wars.” Yeah, we could technically pay for them, although again, we should not be paying to kill people. That’s morally reprehensible.

But technically the government, just like I said, there was a war that cost $300 million per day, but we’re still here. If we were drowning in debt like the libertarians say, that would have just wiped us out.

Steve Grumbine:
00:52:17

Let’s go back to the 80s when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were paired at the hip. Margaret Thatcher famously said,  “There is no such thing as public money, there is only taxpayer dollars.” Ronald Reagan said the same thing.

Okay, so there was a video that unfortunately went out from Jen [Perelman] and Peter when I was on JENerational Change that said, “Kshama Sawant and Jill Stein’s economic ignorance, blah blah blah.” That’s not what the intent of that. It was a clickbait title, and I regret that they used it.

But.  it’s important to know Nina Turner never misses a chance to say, “We shouldn’t let our hard-earned tax dollars go… ” Nina says it all the time. And then Kshama says, “Well we don’t want our tax money going…”

Jill Stein, who actually does know better and has been advised not only personally by me, but also by Michael Hudson and others, still never misses an opportunity to say, “We don’t want our tax dollars going to Israel or the war” or whatever, right?

They feed the very cesspool paradigm that allows Elon Musk to go to all those libertarians and right wingers and say, “We’re going to save your hard-earned tax dollars. Listen to Jill, listen to Kshama, listen to all them.
They even know it’s your hard-earned tax dollars. We’re going to save your hard-earned tax dollars and we’re going to slash all these programs you just don’t like.” Okay? And so it’s a self-own. It’s an own. It’s one of those things where you’re shooting yourself in your privates because you don’t know any better.

And by extension, you are fueling austerity narratives. You’re fueling the race to the bottom. You’re fueling this concept that we need rich people money to finance programs. And it’s a lie. It’s a lie.

It’s not like a misunderstanding. It’s a lie.

So when you think about our own, our heroes, the people we want to work with, we want to organize with, we want to “build a new tomorrow” with, they don’t have any power today. There’s literally no excuse for them to not be saying the correct thing.

And they have been told they do know, but they still double, triple, quadruple down on the taxpayer dollar myth. And they don’t realize that they are hurting the poor. They’re hurting working class people every time they do it. And this is why it hurts.

Because it’s like, I don’t want to break solidarity. I want to lock arms with you. I want to be in camp you. Economics are so horrific. Until you get this down, you can’t do anything right.

Because everything starts with the money story.

Tracy Carson:
00:54:51

Absolutely [everything.] I’m going to get to some comments. Before I get to comments, I’m going to say this. If you know better, [do better], do better.

If you’ve been educating these people about what MMT is like you’re doing me, I’ve learned more about MMT today than I think I’ve ever learned. I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t know,” because I just didn’t know. Right? I didn’t know. I don’t think the average person knows.

Steve Grumbine:
00:55:16

Right.

Tracy Carson:
00:55:17

But there’s a difference between you have the information and then you’re doubling down on lies. You’re doubling down your lies to kind of get people emotionally built up, that’s not going to help for a better day. Right?

That’s not going to do what we need to be done. Now, I’m glad that you kind of took me along that course that you did, because, yeah, I have heard Nina Turner say that a lot.

Yeah, I literally hear her say that.

I’m like, “Well, no, because if the government can create $300 million a day for a war, they could literally pay for reparations for the descendants of African places.”

Steve Grumbine:
00:55:55

I can’t remember her name, but I had Sandy Darity and other ADOS [American Descendants of Slavery] folks on talking with them about reparations in particular, right? Sandy Darity, who is a really, really brilliant man, a scholar down there at Duke, he wrote a book called From Here to Equality. Please check it out.

And it talks about the amount of money that it would be required. You couldn’t do it at a state level.

And there was state-level reparations plans popping up everywhere, just like there were state level freaking health plans and all this stuff. And it’s like if you tell them the truth about economics, they literally lose their mind because “You’re breaking solidarity.”

It’s like, “No, you’re wrong and I’m fixing this, what you’re saying, but you’re not getting it. How do I fix this for you?”

Tracy Carson:
00:56:40

Here’s what they’re thinking because I made this, because I participated in the Medicare for All march, not the first one, because it wasn’t in Indiana, but I organized my own.

They’re thinking, because I asked this question about somebody to Whole Washington, I’m like, “Well, why, if you just started in Washington, I live in Indiana. I’m not going to travel all the way across the nation to get free health care. Why can’t it just be nationwide? Why can’t everybody have it?”

And I never did get an answer to that question.

Steve Grumbine:
00:57:09

Let me tell you this, I’m trying to mend fences with some of them, not all of them, because some of them just absolutely disregarded what expertise I had. And you can’t have a relationship with people that don’t fundamentally respect the areas that you’re knowledgeable in, right?

So when I talked to them, I said, “Listen, I said there might be four states in the country that have enough economic power to do some form of healthcare plan for their state. But there are many, many others.

And there’s something called the [A]CAFR Report or CAFR report, which is the comprehensive annual financial plan basically for each state. Each state has to submit their CAFR report through the government.

And it shows how many days of rainy day fund they have. It shows how full their pension plans are. It shows how well funded they are for a shock to the economy.

And almost all of the states, almost all of them would go belly up quick if you had any kind of COVID hit or if you had any other kind of thing hit, you wouldn’t be able to survive that, okay?

Not to mention if you raise taxes, because at the state level you would need to raise taxes to finance this effort no matter how much it saves somebody. You would need to raise taxes. And by raising taxes you’re going to create flight.” Okay? And this is the race to the bottom that they didn’t want to hear about.

I brought experts, people like Fadhel Kaboub.

I brought legal expert Bill Black. I brought many other people to the table and we tried offline in Zoom calls to explain,
“Look, it doesn’t work that way. And there’s real practical reasons why it doesn’t work the way.” And they say, “well, in Canada it’s like”, it ain’t the same thing.

It is not the same thing. They didn’t understand. We, when we have articles out there that break it down at a very granular level, okay?

A guy like Jonathan Kadmon, a guy named Geoffrey Ginter, many of them wrote extensively on this stuff and broke it down and very, very clear, clear pathway to understanding this stuff. And it was like, we’re already doing this, so we’re not going to not do it. And that was that.

We tried to talk to them all and they got other people to say, “No, no, no, that’s not true. You’re not telling the truth.” And it’s like, listen, it’s simple. You can boil this down without any kind of rhetoric, without any kind of ideology.

And you could say there’s currency issuers and there’s currency users. That’s it. And yes, you can go ahead and put your money, you can put money into stocks and bonds and states do. States have bond holdings. Big time.

To help them survive downturns in the economy, okay? But in reality, that’s still not a currency issuer and that’s still not adequate.

And when you start getting down to brass tacks, you’re going to create flight when you raise taxes. We’ve seen it in every way. It’s been done. I say the federal government should fully fund the states.

There should be no unfunded mandates for the states. They should literally stop taxing at the state level and they should put all the tax into a single tax at the Fed.

They should finance metropolitan areas, they should finance municipal areas, whatever. If you want to have some sort of a secondary tax, I don’t like it, but so be it.

But in reality, the federal government should fully fund the states.

And without doing that, the states are always in a place of precarity where they’ve got to reduce services for the poor. They’ve got to cut school costs. They gotta, you know, dumb down programs for heating for poor people. I mean, there’s so many things that go, alright? Roads get left in ill repair, bridges across the country are  D-rated.

There’s horrible infrastructure problems everywhere because of this weird relationship with the states being currency users and the federal government being currency issuer and the fact that the government keeps reducing spending and cutting costs and the states have to find a way to cover that. And that’s where we get really, really, really bad results, negative results.

Tracy Carson:
01:01:03

And I understand the way they answered it. The way they answered it was like, “Well, if we can get in Washington, then we can get in Oregon, then we can get Texas.”

I’m like, “But wouldn’t it be better if we just had our president just sign it into law and make every state don’t even get them like, Obamacare, which is supposedly good. I guess I missed that whole. I missed that whole train. Apparently, the Affordable Care Act I’m supposed to be satisfied with. I am not. It’s garbage.”

I said what I said. States got this option of opting out. I’m like, “Well, don’t give them the opt out. Don’t give them the opportunity. Well, yes, they can.

They absolutely can.” So I get what you’re saying, but I kind of get what they’re saying. Like, if you started here.

Steve Grumbine:
01:01:46

Right, but the problem is.

Tracy Carson:
01:01:47

But the problem.

Steve Grumbine:
01:01:48

The four. Yeah, the four states. Four or five states that could do it, and then the rest of them can’t do it.

Tracy Carson:
01:01:54

Yeah.

Steve Grumbine:
01:01:55

And let’s say this. Watch this. What is the favorite thing that Republicans do, right?

What they do is they watch a program that we underfund on the left and there’s no left in this country. And we never. So let, I mean, there’s no power left. Okay? So whatever the centrists do, right? They underfund it. And then the GOP goes, “See, it failed.

Every one of your programs failed.”

Well, naturally, if you don’t put the required money into it, if you don’t fund it properly, if you don’t train people properly, you don’t create the real resources that train people for it properly, then you’re going to have a failure of a program and they don’t want it. You know, when you walk into an unemployment office.

I talked about this a few years ago, probably about six or seven years ago, when I was on unemployment and I walked into the office and I took pictures and I took notice. They had chairs with tape on them. They had windows with tape on them. There was broken clocks. You know, everything was dingy and disgusting.

Like they had gone to a, you know, like a Salvation Army and picked up old furniture for the unemployment office. And you’re sitting there and you’re wondering why everybody’s depressed. And it’s intentional.

Because if you go to other government offices, they’ve got nice buildings, they’ve got nice furniture, you know, et cetera. And it was like, “Why are they trying to make the unemployed feel like absolute garbage? Why?”

Because they want you to think that being unemployed means you’re a bad person. They want it to feel like you’re in jail.

They want it to feel like you did something wrong, that you’re a bad guy, and we’re here to get you out of this bad way of life, you unemployed loser.

And it really, really struck a nerve with me, the kind of psychological stuff they do to try to precondition us to hate the poor and to do everything we can to gain distance between us and the poor. And I really resent the fact that I can’t make people realize that states and counties and municipalities are currency users, just like you, I, the business world, etc. The government, the federal government is the currency issuer. Period. End of story.

Tracy Carson:
01:04:00

Before we go, I do have a suggestion. Those theories like such and such and such for dummies. Because I feel like there’s like, a lot.

Do not take what I’m about to say the wrong way, please, because I really. I sincerely appreciate you being on the show, but I said this last night. I think this would be like, I don’t know, a video or something. A book.

I don’t know if people read books anymore.

Steve Grumbine:
01:04:23

We got.

Tracy Carson:
01:04:24

But like something for Dummies. Not to say people are dummies, but something weird.

Steve Grumbine:
01:04:29

Jordan [Chariton] and I will be doing a series trying to do exactly that. It’ll be a collaboration between Real Progressives and Status Coup.

But our own internal group, if we had more volunteers, I’ll say we would probably be able to take some of the old. I mean, we’ve got almost 320 episodes of Macro N Cheese. Inside there, some of the most incredible experts we’ve ever could imagine.

And if we were to take those and to create small videos from them with explainers tied to it, we have content forever. You know, we have so much content.  We just don’t have enough horses in the stable to make it happen right now.

Perhaps in the future we’ll be able to do even more of that. But what you said, there’s no offense taken at all. Just remember, I’m a lay person.

And believe me, if I could drop the F bombs and all the other bombs here, you’d hear the full working-class voice going on. But that said, I’m not an academic. So when you hear the academics talk, it’s even more academic.

Tracy Carson:
01:05:23

Yeah, same like, what? Because I don’t. I don’t think I’m a stupid person.

Steve Grumbine:
01:05:30

You’re not.

Tracy Carson:
01:05:31

When I don’t understand something, that’s why I want to have this conversation. Because I literally was like, I don’t understand.

I think there’s a whole lot more people like me that just are like, “What are you talking about?”

Steve Grumbine:
01:05:46

Why don’t we do this? And this is an open invitation. Anytime you have a question at all, send me a message. I either know the answer or I know where to find the answer.

Tracy Carson:
01:05:55

Okay.

Steve Grumbine:
01:05:56

And so I’m more than happy to answer those questions. I devote almost all of my free time, not with my family or work, to this mission.

And so anything you need whatsoever, if I can’t answer it directly, I will try to find someone that can. I’m happy to come back on. I’m happy to talk to you offline. I mean, I’m happy to be on a show because I want more people to hear it.

But whatever question you have, there’s no question I won’t answer for you.

Tracy Carson:
01:06:21

I’m working with the newly to be formed Justice for All Party. And this is one of the things I definitely want to say, “Hey, yep, we got to stop this with my tax dollars. No, we can’t. We can’t do that no more.”

And I don’t feel like I know enough to take the cruise. Like here. This is what it means.

Steve Grumbine:
01:06:38

I’m happy to talk to anybody anytime.

Tracy Carson:
01:06:40

I really wanted to know. Yes, okay, anytime.

Steve Grumbine:
01:06:43

I’ll do the best I can.

Tracy Carson:
01:06:45

Yeah, so that’s what I wanted. I feel like you’ve given me so much education. I really, really, really enjoyed this. I really did. I’m so glad you could come visit.

And whenever that time comes from, like, could you come back on?

Steve Grumbine:
01:07:01

I’ll make time for you.

Tracy Carson:
01:07:02

So I appreciate it. Like I said, I just learned so much. Catch Steve on Status Coup on Tuesdays. Macro N Cheese podcast on Saturdays at 8 o’clock.

You can watch it anytime, wherever you download podcasts. I will see you all later. Have a fantastic day.

Steve Grumbine:
01:07:19

Thanks again. Take care. We got it. We are out of here.

End Credits:
01:07:24

Production, transcripts, graphics, sound engineering, extras, and show notes for Macro N Cheese are done by our volunteer team at Real Progressives, serving in solidarity with the working class since 2015. To become a donor please go to patreon.com/realprogressives, realprogressives.substack.com, or realprogressives.org.