this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2024
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Lefty Memes
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What is supposed to be the argument for the "genius IQ" opinion? I'm not claiming inflation is this big bad monster some people make it out to be, but frankly, this meme seems like It's advocating for relying on inflation as a way for the state to fund itself without any consequences.
If you just print money to fund a program that has a greater return on investment (ie: schools -> increased productivity, housing the homeless increasing their productivity, reducing waste to "crime" and paying police to harass people, etc), then the money per real asset can actually decrease from "just print money" and have the opposite effect in the long-term (and if these types of things are constantly being funded, then now is the "long term" from earlier investments anyways).
That can be a little tricky though. Are you creating money to pay for education, or are you creating money so consumers can buy bigger SUVs instead of paying the taxes that should be used to cover education?
Why choose inflation when you can just as easily raise other taxes?
I'm sure you agree with me that increasing taxes on inheritance, property, capital gains or really high income would be more efficient than printing money.
It's not choosing inflation. As pointed out, it could actually be deflationary depending how how the money is printed. Funding services and taxing the wealthy are two separate issues. Taxes have nothing to do with funding services and are only used as an excuse to not have universal health care or to much on climate change, both of which could be deflationary if funded by just printing money and doing nothing is inflationary.
Of course I also don't think billionaires should exist because they are separately harmful and only are possibly with exploitation. So I don't particularly have a problem with using taxes as a weapon to combat that symptom of the exploitive system, but it's like using paracetamol to treat an infection - its just treating the symptoms, which might be important to not die immediately and to be able to recover, but ideally you also treat the infection directly and then form antibodies to prevent future infections or have other external chances to reduce infectivity. So I'm not opposing taxes, but generally they are a distraction from other issues and meant to bore people by forcing advocates of such policies to waste time talking about boring specific tax policies rather than building a narrative about a better tomorrow.
Taxes don't fund government expenses
Elaborate, please
Modern Monetary Theory
Anyone who knows economics will see how much I butcher this but here it goes:
Basically modern monetary theory argues that the way we've set up our world, there's really little to know consequence to the US and other large countries to just "print more money" to solve economic issues. Not in the sense of just handing people money, but that they can pay for government programs and stuff by dipping into an invisible pocketbook with no bottom by racking up debt with other countries. As long as we pay interest on it and keep other countries relatively happy everything goes fine.
Again, MMT is a modern economic theory with lots of papers written on it which is why it's also being vouched for by the genius person in this meme.
In my opinion MMT seems like a sick economist brain way of admitting that we produce far more value and wealth than we use in this country, and instead of using that embarrassment of wealth to give humans free food, shelter, and medicine we invent a new way to keep up a class stratified society for long after it was economically necessary.
Yes
I'm not sure what OPs argument is, but maybe it's something like, if we have very high inflation the rich will actually lose money as their savings have less value. While at the other hand wages go up.
This argument is flawed, as the rich usually don't have savings, but investments. Those will actually just go up with inflation. Like if you invest in stocks, gold or houses, all of those will go up in times of high inflation.
So printing money is just going to screw the middle class with some savings in the bank. It's also going to screw young people that don't own a house.
No, it's Modern Monetary Theory which is that all debt creation de facto creates ("prints") money, so unless you cease all loan creation you're always printing money, and thus it should be more accepted to use debt to invest in long term projects.
On Wikipedia it says
Mmt principals (nr 3) Is limited in its money creation and purchases only by inflation, which accelerates once the real resources (labour, capital and natural resources) of the economy are utilized at full employment
So you can't really always print more money, unless you don't care about inflation (that mostly screws the middle class).
But you can print more money while labour, capital, and natural resources are not fully utilised - which is a lot more than it is generally done at the moment.