Episode 237 – What’s Bugging Mathew Forstater?

Macro N Cheese – Episode 237
What’s Bugging Mathew Forstater?
August 12, 2023

[00:00:00] Mathew Forstater [Intro/Music]: Why do we tax if we do not need to raise revenue? And for Lerner, the purpose of taxes and taxation are to affect behavior.

Take social security. The trust fund, as I think we all know, it’s not real. You don’t really have a situation in which you have a specific tax, and those revenues go to a specific use.

[00:01:30] Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43] Steve Grumbine: Alright, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese, and I’ve got a friend from the past. He’s somebody that’s always near and present in my heart, Mat Forstater, one of the originals. The guy who was counting on one hand how many people knew MMT back in the early days with Warren Mosler. And for those of you who don’t know who Mat Forstater is, I’ll keep it short and sweet.

Mat is a Professor of Economics at the vaunted UMKC and the Research Director of the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity. And at the very first MMT conference, I got to physically meet Mat in the lions den in Kansas. And just seeing how many people he has touched personally in this space, is just unbelievable.

Everybody walking outta here is walking out with Mat Forstater’s fingerprints on them. His imprint has been indelible and he has definitely impacted me, and so it’s my great pleasure to have Mat join me again. Sir, it’s been too long, how are you?

[00:02:50] Mathew Forstater: Great Steven. Thank you so much and thanks for that great introduction. I am really humbled by that and I remember well, exactly where we were when we met for the first time, and then even subsequent meetings, like when we had the same sport jacket on in Stony Brook. So anyway, great to be back. Super excited about everything that Real Progressives has been doing since I’ve last been on. Carrying on such important work.

Thanks for having me on again.

[00:03:28] Grumbine: Yeah, absolutely. Really appreciate it sir. And for the folks out there that stumble into what we’re talking about for the first time, it’s the most important subject in so many respects. Because it is the catalyst for money and for building an economy, and that is the tax.

We often talk about the tax, and taxation is a dirty word in a lot of places. You hear the libertarians screaming ‘tax is theft.’ You hear other people saying ‘I’m not worried about paying a little bit more in taxes so everybody can have healthcare.’ People genuinely believe that the currency-issuing governments need an income of currency that they create, but yet the tax of all those things is why the currency Maters, why this currency has held its own.

You wrote some great stuff on taxation, that’s why I hit you up to do this show in particular. Why don’t we start with just the money story and then we can get into the purpose of taxation.

[00:04:33] Forstater: Right. So way back when I first met Warren Mosler and I asked around because I wanted to see, does anybody know who he is. Is he crazy? Is he an axe murderer? How’d he make his money, is it legal? So I asked Paul Davidson, who was one of the premier American Post-Keynesian authors and so on, and he said he is perfectly fine, legit, very wealthy.

The only thing is, he is obsessed with the idea that federal taxes create the demand that drives the currency and gives it value. And when he first asked me about the idea of taxes driving money, because I had been an African-American Studies major at Temple as an undergrad, I just went right to my bookshelf and picked three books off the shelf.

Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Claude Ake’s Political Economy of Africa and Samir Amin Unequal Development. And to see these appear in the bibliographies of Charles Goodheart in his paper on the two concepts of money, and then of course in Wray’s work and so on. And then after that, then I went to the Wealth of Nations and found the quote from Adam Smith where he says “A prince who declares that paper of a certain kind would only settle tax obligations, create a demand for that paper and give it value.” Adam Smith.

And then we were off to the races. And I have the one paper on taxation in Africa under colonialism, and how that was used by the colonial governments, it was so pervasive. And of course it was not just Africa, it was everywhere, the Roman Empire, every area of the world. But then I also had another paper, which was called Tax Driven Money, Additional Insights From the History of Economic Thought, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And what we had found is that many more economists and others in history had understood this idea, even Neoclassicals I quote.

The key was that in virtually every case, what they were arguing is that under certain institutional ‘arrangements’, this is how money can operate. Sometimes they referred to it as something like ‘managed money.’ Of course it was almost exclusively, but not exclusively in terms of what they would call fiat money, intrinsically worthless money that’s not on a fixed exchange rate. And then also my work on Abba Lerner and functional finance really helped me to clarify a number of different things, and let me just briefly state a couple of them.

So the first one, which you referred to a little bit, is that the word “tax” is a little bit misleading. In that any debt obligation: fines, fees, tax and also state money, or the state theory of money, or money is a creature of the state, is also a little misleading because any central political authority, usually in modern terms, it is the state.

But now we know that many, many complimentary currencies, local currencies, are tax driven. And the ones with the most staying power have been tax driven. And I discovered an entire parallel literature on what they refer to as ‘tax anticipation scrip’. A scrip was just another term for paper money and tax anticipation.

So basically, local currencies and complimentary currencies are not a new thing. Anytime when people don’t have enough money, in history, they will eventually make their own. And this happened in the Great Depression, for example, all over the midwest. Many, many of these examples of complimentary currencies and local currencies, and the ones that were successful were accepted in payment of taxes.

So then the other things are just some of the kind of fundamentals of Modern Monetary Theory or functional finance. And these are all things Abba Lerner had argued in the 1930s. He was a professor at the University of Kansas City, which was UMKC’s name back then. And he also was later a professor at the New School for Social Research as well, which also has a history and connection with Modern Money Theory and so on.

So Abba Lerner, he understood back then that under a modern money system, federal taxes should never be used to raise revenue. So then a lot of times the next question is, well why do we tax if we do not need to raise revenue? And for Lerner, the purpose of taxes and taxation are to affect behavior.

And the first specific behavior that the tax is intended to affect is creating a tax and requiring that that tax be paid in the nation’s currency, creates a demand for those otherwise worthless bits of paper and gives them value. So that’s the number one, but it’s not the only. So, tax bads, not goods. An old saying that we want to tax behaviors we wanna discourage and don’t tax, or tax less, behaviors we want to encourage. We tend to do the opposite.

So we shouldn’t be taxing employment income, innovation, things like that. Because those are things that we want to encourage, generally speaking. And then we should be taxing or taxing more, pollution, fossil fuels, things that we want to discourage. Sin taxes. And now one of the things that is very important is that in economic policy, you almost never just have one single policy in isolation, but like a package because of anticipated unintended consequences. Unintended consequences by their nature, they’re unintended. However, we are aware that there are side effects of policies. For example, you can increase spending, but you don’t want to increase it so much that you cause inflation or these kinds of things.

So it always will be a kind of package of policies because some of these sin taxes are regressive. One of the myths or misunderstandings about MMT is because we recognize that taxes are not a funding operation, then there’s this myth that people who support MMT don’t want to use fiscal policy to promote equity.

So of course, taxes are redistribution. You may think that’s great, you may think it’s terrible, but that is what it is. So we can use taxes to promote equity. It’s not only an ethical concern, it is also an economic concern. And a political concern, social concern and so on. Things have gotten way out of hand. So taxation is also intended to promote equity, and to affect distribution and allocation. Resource allocation.

[00:15:41] Grumbine: Can I ask you a question? And this is one that I still struggle with. Every time I hear someone say that we’re using taxation to stave off inflation, because it’s always said in a more generic sense, it gives credence to the concept of Milton Friedman’s quantity theory of money. But in reality, we’re staving off buying power in general.

I’m trying to basically understand. Because if I raise taxes on every single person at the bottom, they’re gonna have a hard time buying stuff. They’re gonna have to make different decisions. So I can see where people having less disposable income creates a scenario where the four Ps of marketing kick in and somebody’s price model has to meet the existing incomes of the potential consumers.

But that said, frequently when I hear of inflation being controlled by this, I guess my question to you is what caused inflation to begin with? And how does taxation satisfy that, and what is that relationship? This is a very core issue for me. But frequently I hear people talking about trying to handle this on the front end before it becomes a problem, rather than trying to claw it back later.

What is your thoughts on that? Help me get my head wrapped around that.

[00:17:10] Forstater: Okay, so this is really important. Because as you imply there, there are different causes of inflation. So if you had inflation due to excess aggregate demand, then taxes are one way, and you have the automatic stabilizers and those will kick in. And that’s an extremely important part of the whole system, is the automatic stabilization aspect. Because if you have to wait for legislation, it takes too long.

Now, traditionally economists who look at these issues, they would argue that taxes can be used to decrease consumption, whereas interest rates can be used to decrease investment. So monetary versus fiscal policy. This is how traditionally, somebody like Richard Musgrave, who’s like the father of modern public finance, looks at these issues.

So the most important inflationary episodes that have been experienced since World War II ended, are not due to excess aggregate demand, but rather due to rising costs of some type, that then are the root of the problem. And sometimes these would be costs that are pervasive, like energy, for example, which is an input into everything. So in the seventies, certainly you had that experience.

So it’s interesting because this is why Lerner’s functional finance, as formulated by him, and just by itself is not capable of achieving full employment and price stability and maintaining it. Because he actually recognized, quite early on, some problems. So in his earliest versions of functional finance, inflation was seen as the result of excess aggregate demand and taxation was seen as the cure.

But as it became apparent that there were other sources of inflation, such a simplistic approach to demand side inflation, would not be sufficient for managing the value of the currency. So Lerner himself then got sidetracked into various income policies, market anti-inflation plans, wage price controls, and so on.

And then the other aspect of this is that Lerner was noticing that inflation didn’t start at true full employment, but well before that point. And he began to use terms like low full employment and high full employment, and this is just unacceptable. It’s too close to the idea of almost like a NAIRU, or natural rate of unemployment.

So that’s why the job guarantee, which was the piece that Lerner didn’t have. He talked about public employment, but he did not have the way the job guarantee works with the budgetary and monetary parts of Modern Money Theory. Lerner, and all economists, they’re complicated people. For me, if someone later in their life says something you disagree with, but earlier on they made a contribution that was important, I don’t think that the fact that they later said something you disagree with, Maters.

The functional finance that Lerner formulated in the 1930s and 40s and 50s really, in his book The Economics of Employment. It’s unbelievable how much he does have in there. Because you don’t really have a specific description of, for example, the way bond sales drain the excess reserves that were generated by deficit spending, to keep interest rates from falling. Learner exactly says it. He had such a intuitive understanding. He is a really brilliant mind.

Anyway, the thing is, I just had a student who wrote a dissertation using functional finance as the framework for analyzing a country with a fixed exchange rate. And the argument is that functional finance doesn’t only assist us in understanding modern monetary systems, it helps us understand all monetary systems, because we can understand. I understand the gold standard so much better now because I understand flexible exchange rates so much better.

And the historical evidence in support, whether you go back to the cowrie shells. Even, for example, one of the fascinating things is that coins that were underweight would retain their full value if they were accepted at full value in payment of taxes. And even way back, they used to make a distinction between those who feel that all monetary systems were chartalist, in a sense. I think Randy Wray would, I think, make this argument. And then you had others who argued that in an earlier era this chartalism doesn’t apply, and then it applies in a modern money system.

So it only is useful for understanding one specific type of system. But I see it as how we understand all of the systems. Because sometimes you understand something by what it is, but sometimes you understand something by what it is not.

[00:26:03] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:26:54] Grumbine: So, if you are thinking about this from a current perspective, so many of the things that we want, that we think we need, let’s call them basic needs, and they’ve been left out there for everyone to forage privately, personally, individually. To find their way through the maze of life, and the narrative is that we’re going to leverage taxes to pay for these things. Because after all, the government doesn’t have any money and it needs your tax dollars to be able to fund these operations.

Now, when Warren speaks of revenue, he goes back to the French, which is revenire. And he says, that basically it just means return where it came from. So in that sense, taxes are in essence, revenue. They’re not revenue for spending, and I think that Marriner Eccles and Beardsley Rummel spoke to this as well. But I guess my question to you is this: we frequently find programs tied to taxation, we find national priorities tied to debt levels, and you had mentioned already that taxes help bleed reserves. Help me understand the role of taxation in provisioning the nation state. I wanna get more specific here. The going narrative that people that are of the mind that the state should do better for its people, they just don’t understand taxation. Wanting to raise taxes to pay for things. The other side, of course, is out there waiting with bated breath for you to please say raise taxes so we can shoot this down and say we’re not raising taxes. What is driving this thinking?

[00:28:58] Forstater: Right. So, quite a complicated set of issues. So, let me share this quote about the Roman Empire, this is from a 1980 History Journal, “the Romans imposition of taxes, paid in money, greatly increased the volume of trade in the Roman Empire. Insofar as money taxes were levied on conquered provinces, then these provinces had to earn money with which to pay their taxes, even at local levels. The Roman imposition of money taxes had a serious impact on simple cultivators, they were forced to produce and to sell more food in order to pay taxes. Cultivators were forced to produce and sell a surplus, which they had not previously produced, or which they had previously consumed themselves.”

So when taxes are imposed they contribute to provisioning, not because the government needs those tax dollars in order to fund its spending priorities, but rather because the need to pay taxes means that citizens need to obtain that which is necessary to settle your tax obligation. And in the United States, that means the dollar. In most countries, it means the national currency, and only the national currency, to settle your tax obligation. So then that sets activity in trade and production in motion. That’s the idea.

And we, in the colonial governments, we had in the statements and in the colonial policy descriptions, they were well aware of using taxes to spur economic activity. That people do not necessarily feel the need to produce beyond their basic needs, or they were living at a higher standard of living, and now then that surplus is being taxed away.

But they also are describing a situation in which a system that was not producing very much surplus, starts to as a result of higher taxes. The question about whether there’s something of a monetarist or Milton Friedman type in terms of the effect on the money supply, I think Randy Wray actually has an article on a Friedman article from the 1950s where Friedman actually, at that time, understood that some of what were traditionally viewed as fiscal operations were actually part of monetary policy and vice versa. In terms of managing the interest rate.

So one of the MMT 101 type things is, so you have the six fiscal operations, government spending of money, taxing, then borrowing and lending of money. Borrowing, so to speak, bond sales. And government giving or taking of money, it’s sometimes described as. So these six are exhausted. Spending, lending and giving, all are additions to total bank reserves, and taxation is a reserve drain. Bond sales are a reserve drain and taking money would be a reserve drain. So it’s the total impact of the net of all of these on the reserves in the system, that then can have different impacts.

For example, on short term interest rates. So, taxes also drain reserves, and of course bond sales do it as well. It appears like bond sales are a funding operation because people look at the total amount of government spending, then the total amount of government taxing, and then the difference in bond sales and they say, ‘oh, well they had to sell those bonds to finance government spending not financed by taxes.’

But instead, the key is that the spending comes first. And so deficit spending, you have a net reserve add, because government spending is adding to reserves, taxes is reducing reserves. If you have a deficit, government spending is greater than tax revenues and so you have a net reserve add. If nothing else is done, then those excess reserves sloshing around in the system are gonna cause interest rates to fall.

So to stop them from falling, we sell bonds to drain those excess reserves. Which happen to be the amount of the difference between government spending and taxes, so it looks like, ‘oh, that’s how we’re funding spending that’s not funded by taxes.’ But the spending came first and the bond sales came after.

[00:36:18] Grumbine: This definitely points to Kelton’s paper. Can taxes and bonds actually finance, government spending at the end? She said, no, they can’t. And that’s where STAB came in versus TABS.

[00:36:32] Forstater: Yes, yes.

[00:36:34] Grumbine: STAB being, spending and then tax and borrow, and TABS being tax and borrow before spending.

[00:36:40] Forstater: Right.

[00:36:41] Grumbine: So I guess my question to you is this. The reserves are entities that live within the banking system alone, they do not leave the banking system. They’re purely for facilitating transactions between banks to the other side of the double entry accounting system we use.

[00:37:01] Forstater: Right.

[00:37:02] Grumbine: That said, when I think of trying to pay for Medicare For All, as an example, Warren Mosler would say, why are you trying to raise taxes? This is a deflationary event. You’re going to eliminate private insurers, you’re going to create less economic activity because the amount of economic activity spent trying to deprive people of care, will no longer be there.

[00:37:29] Forstater: Right.

[00:37:30] Grumbine: So in the end, Medicare For All is deflationary and should require a tax cut, and people’s heads explode when they hear that because it’s so counterintuitive to what they think. This seems like this is a bigger case study on taxation and its effects in general, on policy. Help me understand better this idea of a program being installed that would be deflationary. What would make it deflationary and how does taxation play into that?

[00:38:04] Forstater: Right, so I’m going to get to his specific statement in a second. But take Social Security. The trust fund, as I think we all know, it’s not real. You don’t really have a situation in which you have a specific tax and those revenues go to a specific use. There have been at least things that have been talked about in these terms.

One of the famous ones, I think, was Superfund. Which in the seventies, they were going to use fines and penalties for improper disposal of nuclear waste. And they were going to use those specific revenues for, not even just that specific purpose, but general environmental purposes. But that’s rare. The idea that when they say the ‘trust fund’, there’s not a separate cookie jar and all that, which Randy Wray and Stephanie Kelton and Scott Fullwiler, they’ve all gone over this.

So often those kinds of fictions are done because politicians think that people either understand it better or like to think of it that way. And then also they make politics out of it by saying that the trust fund, that’s not a real thing. So the thing that I think we wanna be moving towards is to delink taxation and spending decisions. Since taxes aren’t a funding operation, then we should make our spending decisions without reference to taxes.

[00:40:34] Grumbine: Agreed. I wanna take this just a step further. I want to think about this in a different sense. I think of these things as two different circles. One is the fiscal operation of the government spending money into the economy, then on the other side is another circuit, and that’s the taxation. And so if we were to divide up to decouple taxation from programs, how would we be able to best assess whether or not we get it right?

There’s a lot of sayings out there, like you can judge a society by how well it takes care of the least of its own. Is there something there to say, yes we’re on the right track, no we’re on the wrong track? And to take that a step further, when designing tax policy, how would you go about making the case that, for example, a program never needs to be paid for? That the government is self-financing? And I guess a piggyback on that will be, you had said that we have to defend a positive interest rate, you didn’t say exact words, you said something similar to that.

I know MMT is a broad subject with a lot of different folks that have different ideas, but it’s got a very core policy, and one of them seems to be a zero interest rate policy or a near zero interest rate policy.

How would that impact that tax conversation if you were to have a zero interest rate policy? It’s two questions. One is focused purely on decoupling of taxes from programs. The other one is looking at interest rate policy as a corollary to those programs.

[00:42:29] Forstater: I think these go together. So one of the things that we could do is eliminate the payroll tax. And that is something that is much more onerous for those who are struggling economically, because you can only give so much of a income tax cut to lower income people. They’re hit more by the payroll tax and sales taxes and things like that.

So all these things, by the way, they have supporters even outside of MMT because one of the things that even mainstream economics tries to do, is to look at the total effects, direct, indirect, intended, unintended of any particular decision. And not just at the direct explicit effect.

And I’ve been a big critic of misuses of social cost benefit analysis, but that’s because cost benefit analysis should not be used in certain situations. But there are some situations in which it can be used, as long as we are aware of its strengths and weaknesses, like anything else. So for example, when Warren is saying that Medicare For All would be deflationary, he’s saying that not just the specific single act of appropriating the spending necessary to run that program, but the total effect. Because what you described as his argument was, that it’s the fact that the decrease in all of the other activities that this would replace, is more than overcompensating.

This is what I am thinking he is thinking of. But that main point that we wanna look at the total impact of any decision. They decide to put a certain business located in a certain part of town and it’s near residential neighborhoods, and they’re saying, ‘well, it’s gonna bring jobs and it’s gonna bring this.’

But you also have to look at that there’s also going to be pollution, and it could affect children who have problems with asthma. So we have to look at all of the effects of any decision, and not only the direct explicit impacts, but the ripple effects and the unintended consequences, and so on.

[00:46:14] Grumbine: One of the things that he does bring up in this, and I know these are not your words, but I’m trying my best to craft what he said because it’s so important. It’s stuck with me for a long time. What it’s come down to is the idea that if we’re not at full employment, the deficit isn’t big enough, but you’re going to be losing jobs.

The jobs that come from those insurance companies, you will end up having more unemployment there. There will be people leaving the workforce, and I’m assuming a part of his concept here is the net effect of unemployment. And when you have unemployment, you wanna spend more, not less. What are your thoughts on that?

[00:46:58] Forstater: Well, that would be possibly part of it. The necessary structural transformations required to face the climate crisis and shift to a sustainable path for our children’s children, or even our children. This is going to be extremely disruptive in the sense you’re describing because some firms, occupations, industries are going to go down.

And then others are going to need to emerge. And certain skills and knowledge and so on will become obsolete, and so the transition from the status quo to a path that is economically and environmentally sustainable. This is why the job guarantees absolutely necessary, as well as other forms of assistance.

But one of the things about the job guarantee is that a lot more people are not only talking about the quantity, but the quality of jobs. Not bullshit jobs, not low paying. But also, people want to be contributing and doing something of value and learning. And the way that the workplace is now, is far, far from that. The quality and the culture of the work environment, these are increasingly going to need to be addressed.

And the job guarantee can address these because the job guarantee ‘job’ can be like a benchmark job. And then if private sector wants to attract workers, it’s going to have to not just match a wage or offer a little bit higher wage, but other aspects of a job.

So that is a way of pressuring the private sector to do better without specific requirement. So, not everybody’s cup of tea, but I think these things work in tandem. And economic policy always has to be in the stage of devising policies. You can’t be thinking about politics. We come up with ideas and then of course we have some kind of general sense of whether something is just completely impossible or not.

But I had been writing on basically a green new deal, but not that terminology, back in the late nineties or early two thousands and we went to Italy. It was Stephanie Kelton, Randy Wray, myself, Pavlina Tcherneva I believe, and I gave a paper on jobs in the environment and functional finance and ecological tax reform. And they thought it was hilarious because they were like, ‘this is so utopian, and you’re a dreamer.’ And not that I ever considered that to be an insult, but it was just like, ‘oh, this is naive.’

And then I am watching the kids in front of Pelosi’s office holding up signs saying ‘green jobs for all’, and AOC holding up the MMT book and making a green job guarantee a cornerstone, essential part of a green new deal. So one day’s utopian naive vision is another day’s reality.

Sumner Rosen, who was one of the founders of the National Jobs for All Coalition and a mentor to me in the early days. He used to always say, ‘you have to have your sails at the ready because you never know which way the wind will blow.’ And if we said, oh, politics are so corrupt and everything that nothing will ever get done, therefore it’s a waste of time to work on anything. And then an opportunity arises, and I get a phone call that asks me for an idea, and I say, oh, I didn’t think there would ever be a possibility, so I didn’t work on anything.

No, uh uh. We gotta have our plans ready to go. So we can’t be worried about all that garbage, and I am so inspired by young people these days. Our local Sunrise and other community groups working for decarceration and a lot of environmental, and also housing, against evictions. And against the big energy company here turning off people’s energy in the wintertime and all these kinds of things. We got young people who are really leading the way.

So we got to help to have economic common sense be part of their training. Which just opens up such a world of possibilities once you realize that if we can manage the system reasonably, that we could have sustainable prosperity. And that’s no small thing.

[00:54:18] Grumbine: I really appreciate you taking the time to walk through this, and I feel much smarter.

[00:54:25] Forstater: Oh, I don’t know. I hope it’ll be helpful for people, but I really enjoy chatting with you.

[00:54:33] Grumbine: The feeling’s mutual.

[00:54:35] Forstater: Anytime.

[00:54:36] Grumbine: What else is going on with Mat Forstater? Is there anything happening that you’d like people to know about as we part.

[00:54:44] Forstater: Well, okay, so Mike Murray, who I’ve done a few edited books on the job guarantee, we have the Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity Publication Series. So he and I are writing an intro macro textbook, and it’s called Not Just Another Principles of Macroeconomics. It will have MMT and other heterodox stuff in it, but it also will cover what any principles of macro normally covers.

And then, well, we have the premier of the movie about Stephanie Kelton and MMT. It’s supposed to be premiering in the fall, and I’m in it for sure. The director thought I presented well. So anyway, I’ve got that going on. And then my dissertation students and just really also to keep UMKCs program strong.

Absolutely.

[00:56:02] Grumbine: It’s the engine brother. It is the engine of MMT. And I really want to give you a big thank you for all the wonderful work you’re putting out there. I just wanna thank you one more time.

[00:56:14] Forstater: Thanks a lot, I appreciate it.

[00:56:17] Grumbine: We have so many people out there that are thirsty and hungry for this information.

[00:56:21] Forstater: Right.

[00:56:24] Grumbine: I hope this podcast helps people get to where they’re trying to get to, so that we collectively can do great things.

[00:56:30] Forstater: Right, and you and Real Progressives, you’re all doing a fantastic job, of really, just a great variety of guests, and I learn. Really…

[00:56:45] Grumbine: Wow, thank you.

[00:56:46] Forstater: Just listening. For sure. So, anything I can do, I feel like, just make use of me. Whatever we can do.

[00:56:56] Grumbine: Yes, we will.

[00:56:57] Forstater: Nice.

[00:56:58] Grumbine: We will. You have my word on that. Folks, you have my word on that, that we’ll be bringing Mat Forstater in to do more stuff. Alright, well with that in mind, Mat once again, I wanna thank you for joining me on this episode of Macro N Cheese. I’m Steve Grumbine, the host. My guest, Mat Forstater.

We are outta here.

[00:57:21] End Credits: Macro N Cheese is produced by Andy Kennedy, descriptive writing by Virginia Cotts, and promotional artwork by Andy Kennedy. Macro N Cheese is publicly funded by our Real Progressives Patreon account. If you would like to donate to Macro N Cheese, please visit patreon.com/realprogressives.