Comments by "Curious Crow" (@CuriousCrow-mp4cx) on "How come Labour can find money when it wants to?" video.
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The Winter Fuel Allowance was not allocated efficiently or effectively. Efficient use of tax receipts doesn't give money to those who don't need it. So any government should ascertain a civilised standard of living for pensioners and people on benefits, and those who are above that standard should not get it. The problem is that the government standard of living for pensioners is too low. And that's an inherited problem, that can't be fixed anytime soon. The Cost of Living in the UK is going up strongly, and pensioners are not all loaded, but some are. And it unfair just to discribute limited funds willy-nilly. The basic living needs for pensioners needs to be addressed in a way that is clear and understandable. Nobody understands pensions at all. That's why the winter fuel allowance was poliiticised and paid as a bribe, but a serious number of pensioners were still needing to choose between heating or eating, whilst those who didn't need it, were getting it anyway. That should not be the case. That the state pension is still to low to live on, is another inherited situation, and pension Credit is still too low. That's the real issue, and for that you can blame a long line of givernment back to Thatcher who fiddled the National Insurance Fund and broke the link with wages. Google 'The Rape of The National Insurance Fund" by the late Tony Lines, and you'll see why pensions and the NHS ended up being squeezed for cash. The report is still online, and it ties into the Waspi Women as well. And the amount lost if adjusted for inflation are eye-watering. The fact is, the problem is too big now for any quick and easy fix, and it's only going to get worse. Political opportunism is only possible where people don't know what's really happened over nearly 5 decades. And labour can't fix it, because the accumulative problems has wrecked the potential for real growth in the UK.
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I think you need to read "Money" by David McWilliams. Then you'll actually understand the subject, because McWilliams is not a proponent of MMT, but understands the limitations of the theory in the real world. You don't in any real sense economically or politically. Why? If what you say was even just a little bit true, it would mean you love being "socially controlled." You like spending money, and don't mind receiving it. Hell, if you were to be paid to write comments like you have, you wouldn't refuse, would you? If you're writing these comments for free, then you are simply confusing the Map with the Territory. If you want to ground your critique in reality, rather than ideology, you need to study what Theory is. And you will then understand why MMT is nothing more than a map. It is not perscriptive, but descriptive. The whole thing about thing about MMT is not that it is incorrect. It is correct. But what does that mean for those creating monetary policy. Arguing ideologically about MMT is like arguing that a weather map shouldn't show where rain might fall. Not only is that iilliogical, it's pretty irrelevant. The only thing that matters to someone who using a map is what they should do about it. If there's a drought, then rain is to be welcomed. If there's too much rain, then that's a different matter. These are real world constraints, and every theory comes up against reality. It's reality that determines the applicability of any theory. For instance, two theories were tested by a charity - the first was Milton Friedman's assertion that Inflation is solely a monetary phenomenon, and the second was a theory of John Maynard Keynes, who argued that injecting direct money transfers to individuals would have a multiplier effect on overall economic activity, in that the benefits would cascade over time. A Randomised Control Study was carried out in Kenya, and Friedman's hypothesis (theory) was disproven, and Keynes was proven within a 30-month time scale. Fine. But what does these findings mean? and what are the implications? These are the real-world constraints on theories, which can be tested for. MMT has constraints, which haven't yet been tested for. Yet, the idea has been politicised, which doesn't help anyone. The truth is that MMT is a theory to describe only a very, very limited source of money creation. Indeed, it is the only source of money creation that governments have chosen to retain direct control of, but the amount of money produced accounts for less than 10% of the money in circulation. The other 90% is ledger money, aka Bank Credit in the private sector and created by banks issuing loans. So the idea that MMT is a form of Social control is just plainly wrong. It can't be, because it's impact is minimal. By outsourcing almost all money creation to the private sector, governments have reliquished control over the money supply. Indeed, the offshore money market is huge - $12trn market cap - but no government controls it. Until 2008, it operated outside government control, until greed and ambition wrecked it, throwing the whole global financial system into a crash, and governements agreed to bail it out, because every bank on the planet were involved. They used MMT to do that, instead of letting the whole system collapse, because there was no other source of money to do it on the scale it needed to be done. If governments had done nothing, there would be no money left in the private sector. That's the reality - they socialised private losses. Was that the right thing to do? Well, that's a debate that cannot be concluded, but how they did it, and what they didn't do impacts us to this day. The financial sector is more regulated, but banks can't make as much money, and that's a problem, when the demand outstrips supply, especially for USD, the global reserve currency. And the pandemic replicated those mistakes. MMT wasn't the source of those mistakes. People's ideas and beliefs were. And MMT is just pointing the finger at those. It doesn't say when or how money should be created by governments. People do thst, and their motivations need to be questioned, and MMT allows us to identify them and how people act upon them. It's not a prescription. It's a description, and the GFC and the pandemic showed the decisions made regarding monetary policy proved the description correct, but like good theories should do, it also raised important questions about policy decisions made, and the consequences. So, that's what you should be zeroing in on. A knife is only a tool, that can kill or cure depending on how it used. The theory that describes that truth is not to blame for it being used to kill or cure. It's the persons using it. MMT raises those fundamental questions that some people - very powerful people - would prefer remain unaddressed. They can't though, because the consequences are still with us, and will cause problems for those who follow us.
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