Keith Evans
2 min readSep 19, 2021

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Taxation is a system of state revenue, simply put, it’s how the government makes its money. Sometimes through direct measures, and sometimes through modern monetary theory. I won’t go in on MMT too much since that’s a whole other tangent. But one way or another: The state produces the economic resources needed.

You have obviously missed the point of MMT. Taxation is "NOT" a revenue source for a sovereign fiat currency-issuing government. Taxation serves to drive demand for the currency and regulates the money supply, but is never needed to "fund" spending. Tax payments are "destroyed" by the debt that created the currency in the first place and cannot survive that first-order accounting to be "recycled" to spend.

Such a currency issuer always has an infinite number of its units of measure available to deploy resources and labor in the private sector. To my knowledge, there is no "infinite+1" that would increase that spending ability by the amount of "revenue". Besides that, the currency must exist in the private sector before it can be collected as tax payments or borrowed via bond issues.

I would not object to a partial ownership of corporations owned by labor and other stakeholders, but that is highly unlikely given any political climate we have experienced since the New Deal, and especially since RayGun gutted unions. MMT, if it is widely understood by voters, offers similar solutions via the democratic process and representatives feeling the pressure of an aware populace.

MMT is "HOW IT WORKS NOW" and only that lack of awareness stands between us and a more responsible government "of the people" and "for the people".

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Keith Evans
Keith Evans

Written by Keith Evans

Meandering to a different drummer.

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