He's read and responded to all of your authors. MMT is new and innovative.

Critics have argued that MMT is not a theory because there is no mathematical model. Others have argued that there is a theory but that there is nothing new and, even if there is, it is not valid, it is misleading, and it pushes the logic too far. For example, Palley (2014, 2) notes that MMT fails “to produce a model and […] that is why they fail to advance debate. If MMT-ers did produce a model, I am convinced […] readers would also see there is ‘no there there.’” Others, like Palley, have argued that “MMT often boils down to nothing more than an especially naïve sort of Keynesianism” (Selgin 2019) with “nothing new under the sun” (Cachanosky 2021) or that, as Rogoff (2019) put it, MMT “is just nuts” and a bunch of “nonsense” that will lead to disasters if applied to policymaking (Summers 2019). Like all economic frameworks, MMT builds on past theoretical developments to improve our understanding of how the economy operates. Through this framework, MMT proponents arrived at some well-known conclusions, but to argue that there is nothing new is a mistake. Among the most striking conclusions of MMT is that taxes and issuances of securities are not a source of funds for government spending, “deficit financing” is not an appropriate terminology, and government spending proposals should not be scored and voted on based on their impact on the public debt. MMT completely changes the way of thinking about government budgeting procedures and changes the approach to taxes and government spending. This alone ought to be considered innovative, although it builds on the macroeconomic work of Abba Lerner and Beardsly Ruml in the 1940s, the credit theory of money developed by A. Mitchell Innes in the 1910s and Thomas Smith in the 1830s, as well as the monetary experiments and observations of economists and politicians all the way back to Adam Smith and Jean Baptiste Say, and the US 6 colonies in the 17th and 18th centuries (Forstater 2006; Ruml 1946; Lerner 1943; Smith 1832; Innes 1913, 1914; Grubb 2008). One can retrace the origins of MMT’s conceptualization of government finances all the way back to Roman times when jurist Julius Paulus, noted “the importance of public authority backing money and the fact that the value of money does not depend on its substance” (Rüfner 2016, 99). Similar experiences can be found in ancient and early imperial China (Thierry 1993), ancient Greece (Peacock 2006), and Africa (Forstater 2006).