You’re welcome to disagree, but that’s precisely my point: That here we have a renowned Marxist economist being wrong about basic things that even a layperson like me can identify.

Here’s the worst of his errors (emphasis mine):

For whatever reason, if the taxes are less than the spending, then there’s a gap, and the simple name for that gap is “the deficit.” And how does the government go about doing it? How can the government spend more than it raises in taxes? And the answer […] is that the government does what you do: it borrows the money.

This is fundamentally false. A sovereign state that has a monopoly on money creation is nothing like you or me, or a even like a business. And when it’s a fiat money, the fallacy is all the more obvious. Businesses and families are users of money while the state is the issuer of money.

It’s true that the US currently does borrow its own currency, but unlike you or me or a business, it clearly doesn’t have to, because it can and does create money by fiat.

The question one should be asking is, why is the state borrowing its own money? Because the answers are illuminating, and they’re not for the reason Wolff is implying.

By making this error, Wolff is perpetuating the neoclassical economic “common sense” that a country should be run like a family or a business. He’s bolstering neoliberalism’s own propaganda.

He’s also often wrong in talking about our “taxpayer dollars,” which perpetuates the idea that our taxes pay for anything. And a big problem with that is the implied framing: that the more taxes one pays, the larger a stake one ought to have in how the state spends money. It’s an anti-democratic bourgeois framing.

These errors are frustrating because he’s responding to many requests from people like me who are pushing back on them, and he still fumbles it. So they’ve become calcified in this 83 year old, and there’s no hope of movement in this area from this person with a platform, which I suspected but hoped this video would prove wrong.