If you want to fight universal credit (and austerity), you need to know why the “taxpayers’ money” framing is factually flawed and dangerous.

Reducing benefits payments cannot ever, ever, ever “save taxpayers money”. It’s *literally* impossible, because the pounds you pay in tax don’t get piled up and subsequently spent anywhere. They get deleted from existence. The central government does not need your taxed pounds to spend. Going along with the fiction that it does is deadly for the most vulnerable people in society.

Reducing the government’s budget deficit, by whatever means, reduces the non-government sector’s budget surplus, as a matter of accounting identity. The non-government surplus is *our* money.

To be compassionate, effective participants in our democracy, we need to be working with macroeconomic fact, or we’re going to get more lethal policies, more right-wing demagoguery and further dismantling of our country’s most hard-won and precious assets.

The “taxpayers’ money” line of attack will never work.

Me and my friend Patricia made this podcast, because we think it’s vital to demystify economics. Hope you get time to have a listen!

Sorry, I know nobody asked, just writing this in case anybody else feels the same way.

I think our political culture is in arrested development, somewhere between:

South Park-ism

(“Having an ideology is stupid and not cool. I transcend this by ridiculing all sides, ignoring any power imbalance.)

and

West Wing-ism

(“The problem with our political and media systems is that we fail to appoint good and special people to office. It’s our fault things are bad, because we’re stupid in this respect. Our problems are not systemic, so no need to change systems. Rather, let’s dream about what a magical president/news anchor/rugged individualist would do. If we‘re humble in our stupidity, maybe clever people will save us.”)

Just trying to diagnose the patient here.

Hi guys, this might not make much sense unless you’ve been following my adventures in economics (including my podcast), but hopefully, if you have the time, you might pick up the context as you read.

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An open letter to non-Modern Monetary Theory economists.

Dear non-MMT economists,

I’m sorry that your feelings are getting hurt lately.

I know you think all MMT advocates act and speak as one, so here, let me treat you all as one entity and tell you on behalf of all of us, why sometimes we might come across a bit testy.

We study, we learn, the clock is ticking. We lose our jobs, our standard of living declines, our public services are deliberately underfunded to the point of collapse and those least able to fend for themselves in our communities suffer and die. Year on year. Because of some numbers on a spreadsheet at a central bank, and the way you talk about them.

No-one is paying us to learn. No one is paying us a nice salary to unquestioningly repeat orthodoxies, or we’d all be calm like you.

Some of us aren’t getting paid for anything anymore, no matter what we do. (And you know that’s a policy choice, right? There’s no unemployment in nature? Monetary systems create unemployment. Of course you know that. You guys are smart. You know everything.)

We study, we learn, we search for answers. While one group of politicians destroys our society, another group of politicians waits in opposition (armed with the same economic framework as our antagonists – the one you keep handing them) to do the same thing in a “kinder” way. They are ripping out the backbone of our civilisation. Because debt. Because insolvency. Because inflation. Because Phillips curve. Because “the government is like a household and has to balance its books”. When politicians do these destructive things, they do it because you gave them permission.

Then we discover the work of Warren Mosler, Bill Mitchell, L. Randall Wray, Stephanie Kelton, Pavlina Tcherneva, Steven Hail, Ellis Winningham… Economists who are actually bothered about changing public consciousness around economics.

Because it’s a matter of life and death.

We learn MMT. We learn that monetarily sovereign governments can never “run out of money” – the very fallacy that policies of austerity were founded on, which persist to this day.

We come to you and call you out on your complicity with orthodoxy. Your response to MMT: “Oh yeah, what you’re saying is nothing new, we knew this all along…”

Oh did you? Our response to you is:

Where.

The.

Fuck.

Were.

You?

Because we looked, and we found bullshit, and then we found MMT. You guys must’ve been writing your MMT columns so they looked like bullshit. Sorry for not picking up on that.

Our political systems are falling prey to right-wing demagogues who promise a new way forward, women and minorities suffer and die in this new political climate – in large part because all you have for the would-be progressive community is TINA.

Anyway, if you’re insulted, get used to it. Welcome to the world of people noticing what you do and the effect it has, and holding you accountable.

Thanks for everything, but if the accountability and emotion is getting to you, and you don’t feel like you can write another word ever again, never mind, I guarantee the world will do just fine.

Yours,

All Of MMT xx

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