Economic Update: Government Deficits; Why They Happen, Who Benefits From Them, and MMT

Richard Wolff mentions the printing of money occasionally, but he never squares that with the government supposedly needing to tax and/or borrow first before it can spend.

He spends the last two minutes talking about MMT, but not as a theory of fiat money; instead as a novel monetary policy proposed by “progressive-minded economists.”

Somewhere in there he also repeats the common fallacy that what banks lend is other people’s savings. They don’t. The money they lend is created out of thin air, and the “money multiplier” is a myth.

I’m just a technerd who’s never taken an economics course, and I grind my teeth every time this expert botches these fundamentals. Why Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai never push back on him when they do talks together is a mystery to me.