The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy

摘要

This book has three interrelated objectives: explaining Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), pushing an agenda of public spending for social insurance, and sketching a memoir on the author's experience in public life. I'll discuss these objectives backward. The memoir component lightens up the whole book and makes for an interesting read, lively and funny at times. The public-spending agenda, mostly detailed in the last chapters of the book (chapters 7 and 8), contains provisions for infrastructure, education, health care, job guarantees, etc. These are large but generally worthwhile public-spending objectives. How large is hard to say-and the book does not contain an estimate. The lack of an estimate is perfectly consistent with the logic of the book, which is set to lav out a theoretical struc-ture showing that the government budget constraint essentially does not matter, that monetary financing can support any public spending the government sets its mind to: "if Congress wants to accomplish something, the money can always be made available" (p. 4).