Better than MMT

My comments on this MMT video.

I'm one of the few Libertarians who think MMT would not be so bad. It would not change much.

MMT does not say deficits do not matter it says that they can cause inflation and that would require cutting spending and/or raising taxes. To understand this it good to think not about money, but about goods and services.

So if you do a Green New Deal and it draws resources away from more productive uses to less productive uses, that is waste, which is why instead of Green New Deal, a CO2 tax and a payout for the removal of CO2 from the air would be better than an MMT funded Green New Deal. 

In fact we already have a mini Green New Deal new in the form of CAFE standards. The paragraph below shows how poorly it works:

"I and other scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimate that the new standards will cost the economy on the whole — for the same reduction in gas use — at least six times more than a federal gas tax of roughly 45 cents per dollar of gasoline. That is because a gas tax provides immediate, direct incentives for drivers to reduce gasoline use, while the efficiency standards must squeeze the reduction out of new vehicles only. The new standards also encourage more driving, not less."

So that's a huge waste of the scarcest resource, human effort.

A function of taxes not mentioned in the video, is to let voters know, as much as possible, how much Government functions are costing. They always cost something. You could for that purpose do the opposite of MMT and insist that all government be funded through taxes and let the Federal Reserve provide all the money to the economy even if that requires keeping interest rates at 0% forever and even buying assets in down turns. I think that I would prefer that because the incidence of Government spending falls on the citizens one way or another, all of it, and so the citizens as much as possible the citizens should know the costs.