MMT may be politically neutral but human beings are not. Some champion establishment politics which is damnable. Others cosplay a democracy. Understanding multiple lenses away from just ledgers will allow you to understand the real material conditions working class must contend with, the lack of agency they have to alter the outcomes and the tools oligarchy uses through understanding the MMT lens. To simply understand ledgers doesn’t provide analysis. Analysis has to take in who wins, who loses, the mechanics of wins and losses and the insights to understand how it plays out.
Example…
Sectoral balances… an accounting truism. You will see this in the red ink, black ink mirror diagrams Stephanie Kelton will use to show the government spending is the universal set of private sector, non-currency-issuing entities that hold dollars. That includes Microsoft, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Halliburton, Boeing, United Healthcare, Donald Trump, Harvard, Ford, OpenAI, and of course, households.
So when you evaluate a program like the ACA, see where the money flows.
When you see a military intervention, see where the money goes.
Ask yourself… did the aggregate “the non-governmental sector” tell you the vital information? Of course you know the government is the currency issuer… but whatever can you glean from it?
I posted a while back about the issue with aggregates (meaning pooling everyone into the ‘non-governmental sector’… its really bad form to stop at ‘non-governmental sector’ isn’t it? I mean, humans do not live in aggregates. Go to some of your favor elites houses and ask if we all live the same? Ask how some got rich and others didn’t. Ask why we celebrate this when the reality is the inequality is so gross. So repulsive… so inexcusable that to aggregate us all into the ‘non-governmental sector’ feels oily… feels like you are selling a lie to obviate capital accumulation from this repulsive system. To make it normal. To pretend that governmental deficits are private sector surpluses and pretend that non-governmental savings are kind of a shared experience. Its not. It aggregates massive wealth disparity by using very simple black white sectors to make us all feel as one with Blackrock. With Peter Thiel. With Donald Trump. With Hillary Clinton. With Barack Obama.
It is not good enough to say that. Because the person listening INHERENTLY understands how unfair and disgusting the system actually is.
Making room for capital accumulation for the wealthy to be a normal thing… to just say it is their “savings desires” ignores the predatory nature of finance capital and the source if their incomes.
MMT is an absolutely VITAL LENS.
But it is inadequate to answer the analysis for our lives. It is macro. Macro is aggregates. To stop a conversation with macro aggregates is to deny the material reality of 99% of the people in the world.
We have to make sense of the world… how things came to be… how the institutions we revere came to be. Who they serve. Stop pretending they serve the 99%. Cease… think. Think. Think.
Then ask yourself why you have voted so hard only to have absolutely NOTHING done for you or your family. Ask why none of these institutions actually serve you or your family. Why you are treated as a criminal if you cannot afford to live based on the real economic terms you are forced to subsist under.
Then, if you choose to be honest, then you will admit that you need a class lens to marry with your MMT lens.
Sadly, many elite, bourgeois types think that our efforts to incorporate class with MMT lens is ‘wrong’ but those same people pretend they are capitalists…
In the end, 99% of us will suffer if we skip stratification. If we allow Bill Gates and Elon Musk to be conjoined to our place in the GDP.
They are about to seize paychecks in the US for student debt payments that the government has already paid to the institutions. The money you are paying simply goes to a new business the elite created called “Loan Servicing Companies” which get a percentage of our payments and the rest the government simply deletes as if it were a tax. Remember this. Who is that serving?
Stop being a normie and learn this so we can fight back.
MMT+Class = awakenings.
