Heavily discount pro-MMT evidence- their arguments are weak ad homs

(Doug, , 2-21)

If the job guarantee is MMT’s most attractive feature, the style of argument habitually employed by its proponents is among the ugliest. A classic example is a response by Wray and occasional collaborator Éric Tymoigne to a fairly friendly critique of the school by the left-Keynesian economist Thomas Palley, in which they accuse him of wanting to combat inflation with unemployment and poverty, a dishonest insult that they compound with this footnote: “Palley has been caught on video complaining that if a JG provides jobs to everyone, the poor will be able to eat . . .” (The video is from an exchange between Palley and Mosler, in which Palley says that providing the unemployed with jobs in South Africa would promote demand for electricity, food, TVs, and other goods that the country doesn’t have the capacity to produce.) Tymoigne and Wray’s response to Palley barely addressed any of his substantive points — among other things, its vagueness about the causes and consequences of inflation, its naïve belief in the curative powers of fiscal policy, its irrelevance to the problems of poorer countries, its lack of interest in how the JG might tempt anti-worker governments to replace public sector workers with underpaid transients — and just reasserted the catechism, spiced up with some rude caricatures. They also guard their turf jealously. When asked by the liberal economist Dani Rodrik to react to a polite and friendly effort by two left economists to reconcile MMT with more mainstream schools of economics, Kelton pronounced herself “not remotely” comfortable. Rodrik had called the economists’ paper an MMT “explainer”; she urged him to be “careful about labeling any post with MMT in its title an ‘MMT explainer.’” The brand must be protected. And they can be extremely slippery. If you ask, “Do you really believe the government doesn’t need to tax or borrow to spend,” which is something they frequently do argue, they’ll deny it. When questioned by a sympathetic Ryan Grim of the Intercept about what happens when the government spends without taxing or borrowing (something the United States never does, but bracket that for now), Kelton says it depends on who gets the money. If rich people get it, they’d probably save it. If poor people get it, “they’d spend it into the economy.” She had nothing to say about whether the economy could accommodate that demand. She professed “tremendous respect [for] the real constraints in the economy,” but in fact MMTers have almost nothing to say about those — and Mosler, Tymoigne, and Wray responded to Palley’s comments on the topic with insults. Nor do they ever remind their social media fans, intoxicated by the power of keystrokes, about those constraints.