You, like most critics of MMT, mix your analysis liberally with assumptions based on gold standard logic that complies with a system which artificially limits demand and denies sectoral balances. Just your preoccupation with the word “debt” as something negative but required to increase the money supply shows this.
How does one “borrow” what doesn’t yet exist? If it exists to be borrowed why then should the issuer/creator of that thing need to borrow it before deploying it to serve its general purpose? Just facing the logic behind those questions turns orthodox econ on its head and forces one to look at the entire process of money creation and taxation (bonds are just temporary taxation) from a different perspective.
In spite of all of the complexities, jargon, and formulas that evolved from our monetary system, the government has only two functions in its interactions with our nation’s currency. It creates it when it spends into the private sector to provision itself and pay for social programs, and it deletes/destroys it when it collects it back in any form. If one understands dual entry spreadsheet accounting and simple sectoral balance principles they are better equipped to understand economics than most “economists” with their degrees and myriad of formulas and jargon.
Regardless of any history of money and its representation/store of value almost all modern economies now use a fiat system that allows the sovereign the exclusive patent on its money creation and denomination. This is enforced via the sovereign’s ability to levy and collect taxes payable only in the denomination it creates at will to assure it can provision itself without a revenue stream. However, if its currency is to be accepted as the denomination of trade and store of value derived from commerce it must spend more into the private sector than it demands back in taxation. Otherwise, the population soon figures out that it is stealing resources without compensation.
Weaponizing the debt politically has made balanced budgets the holy grail for politicians, especially anti-tax conservatives. The fact that this represents a 100% tax rate, leaving nothing in the economy to save/store value, retire private sector bank debt, or compensate for trade deficits is entirely lost on them, the media, and the general population that depends upon them to be semi-literate. Much of the blame for this can be directed to the banking industry that employes or enables the mainstream economists and those who educated them.
Less dependence on public money creation means more dependence upon private sector debt and a constantly growing GDP needed to “roll over” that debt in the absence of public money required to net retire it. Any threat to capitalism presented by MMT will come in the form of a “pitchfork and torches” reaction should the working class ever figure out that “their” government hands newly created money over to the investment class “AND” offers it a guaranteed return vehicle in which to park the money before the non-financial sector ever gets a dime of it, or that the much vilified “debt” used to gain their compliance is nothing more than a record of the net money supply after bank debt is settled and not a mortgage on their future productivity.
Is $22 Trillion too much money to have in circulation/savings in the private sector of the richest economy on earth? We probably should have that conversation, However, that will not happen without also discussing the distribution of that money and how that came about. Let’s talk about it, but from the perspective of the reality of the monetary system we currently use, not some fantasy with purposeful complexity to distract attention from that reality.
