You are correct that AOC always speaks from an MMT perspective, but I’m not sure you completely understand what that is. To the “federal” government there is no point in worrying about marginal costs since the Congress can spend any amount required to achieve a goal, in this case, a lot more new schools, as long as physical resources and labor are available to do so, without concern for “revenue”.
Schools, of course, are largely funded via state and local taxation and those entities don’t have the advantage of being the monopoly issuer of a sovereign fiat currency they can never run out of. Denying this power of the purse in political rhetoric and promoting debt fear propaganda is the mainstay of conservative politicians, although neoliberal Dems have been joining the chorus since Clinton’s touted budget surpluses as a way to promote higher marginal tax rates on the wealthy and corporations.
Conservatives naturally fight this view of our federal spending, even though it is correct, because of their animosity toward the federal government and that government’s tendency to subvert the will of the states, especially in the education curriculum. People in power like to control things they are spending on, even though it isn’t their money being spent.
The fault is certainly shared, but that doesn’t change the hard reality of federal level economics and how they impact the overall economy. Liberals love the federal government’s power to take money away from the wealthy simply because they have too damn much of it and conservatives love having control at lower levels of government where they can better reach hearts and minds, even if it means doing a disservice to both.
When federal spending and tax revenue (an oxymoron for regular morons according to one prominent MMT economist) are disconnected, the restraint of “affordability” is off the table and the focus then becomes resources and talent, which are more abundant when proper investments are made in both. We should seriously think about placing the CBO under the authority of the Federal Reserve to allow it to give proper weight to inflation instead of simply reinforcing the attention paid to deficits to give campaign fodder to ignorant (or corrupt, take your choice) politicians.
It is the concept that taxpayers and bond investors “fund” the federal government that AOC is referring to as “scarcity mentality”. To say that federal deficit spending “funds” both is far more accurate. Reversing our perception of economic reality causes voters to consider their federal government as an “overhead cost” to the economy instead of the only source of currency able to store value in commerce or net retire private debt. Constantly cutting vital programs to benefit the public, often to the point of cruelty, and constantly reminding us of the “national debt” (that isn’t even a debt) forces us into that scarcity mindset needlessly, so one has to worry about agendas afoot.
