Charlottesville
April 24, 2024
I like the Daily Show. Not as much now as I used to. The current show works too hard for laughs. Others will disagree, but many times I thought Jon Stewart was both educating me and incidentally made me laugh. No doubt both versions of the show are liberal leaning, although at times Stewart called out left leaning people and organizations. He has always though much of the media overhypes the “news.”
I didn’t like this episode of the show. I thought it did the viewers a disservice. Ronny Chang is embarrassing with his lack of knowledge of economics, although he is probably much more representative of the American voter. Klepper asks some decent questions but let her off too easily.
She does make a good point that while intuitively appealing, likening the government spending to a household budget is ludicrous.
Most well-known economists think MMT is BS — not in whole but it has big holes. Deficit spending is not inherently bad. It should be done during recessions to juice the economy and so long as the funds are invested in projects that earn a return greater than the cost of the debt, then that spending makes sense. But to fund wars? No!
The guest cops out on inflation. Of course inflation is a huge issue if there is too much money floating around. They should have asked her about Milton Friedman’s take on the cause of inflation (government spending and an oversupply of money). They should have asked her about our recent inflation and asked her to explain what MMT would have had the Fed do differently.
I read a good article about inflation recently. Very critical of economists. Said we are no closer to being able to predict inflation. I thought that was a good point. The goal of economists should be to develop an algorithim that predicts as opposed to explains in hindsight. Take some of those math wizards who work as quants on Wall Street and turn them loose on predicting inflation.
Oh, one other point. Isn’t it funny (sad) that no politician can tell us what the appropriate level of government debt is. (Although I know I’m not voting for one who says we should not have debt!)
If you are into this topic, you might find this short paper by a traditional economist enlightening: