| >> "MMT relies heavily on the fact that tracing back who is paying for it is so convoluted that its backers can claim nobody is"
> I don't know what that means. Lets jump over the the Wiki page on MMT where it has a helpful comparison to Keynesian economics [0]. First line in that table: Keynesian: Advocates taxation and issuing bonds (debt) as preferred methods for funding government spending. MMT: Emphasizes that taxation and debt issuance are not required to fund spending. Under the Keynesian model I can tell who is paying for government activity - taxpayers and lenders. I can also work out how much, by comparing how much tax they pay or how much they lend. It is reasonably transparent about who the government is distributing resources away from (net taxpayers, current lenders) and towards (net tax receivers, people who are enjoying the latter stages of a bond where the interest is payed back). People could have claimed resources; then they were taxed/saved so they didn't. How do I do that under the MMT model where neither of those things are necessary? Who is the government distributing resources away from? How do I figure that out? I know where they are going. Where do they come from? When we debate MMT inspired ideas, how will we figure out who will be worse off in real terms and in what proportion? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Monetary_Theory#Compari... PS. > But MMT it's not a policy, but a model People aren't interested in MMT because it is a neat model; but because if we use that model then it becomes very hard to explain that policies are wasteful uses of time and stuff. It is very easy to make a taxpayer understand why government waste is bad. Quite hard to make people take an interest when nobody knows if they are net givers or takers. |
Anyway, you are implying that the current system is Keynesian, and that there are people advocating to change to a MMT system. But the current system is already MMT.
So, to answer your question, for accountability, you could just keep in place the current way of doing things (or find some alternative) but recognize that "taxation and debt issuance are not required to fund spending". Let's recognize that public debt is irrelevant for instance, and that, yes, deficits can be inflationary, if the economy is already in full utilization but could not be in the proper circumstances.
>>" People aren't interested in MMT because it is a neat model; but because if we use that model then it becomes very hard to explain that policies are wasteful uses of time and stuff. It is very easy to make a taxpayer understand why government waste is bad. Quite hard to make people take an interest when nobody knows if they are net givers or takers"
So, basically, what you are saying is "let's lie to people" so we can have a smaller government.
They say that naming is one of the hard things of computer science, maybe it's also true for economics. Let's change the name "public debt" for "public investment" and discuss then how much public investment can we afford.