A New Story: Politics for the 21st Century

 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/business/biden-taxes-business-rich.html Sunday March 28, 2021.  I woke to find this article about the Biden tax plan in the New York Times.  As a recent convert and now devotee of Modern Monetary Theory, reading this article made me want to pull my hair out.  The "Deficit Myths", to use Stephanie Kelton's phrase, jump right off the page.  I did write a comment on the NYT on-line forum, but it seemed to limited.  And the fact is that there is so much in this article that is informative, I decided to write a much longer piece going through it line by line and annotating the issues.    The title: "Under Biden, Democrats are Poised to Raise Taxes on Business and the Rich" Great!  This is clear.  But the problem comes in the sub-heading; "The president’s infrastructure proposals are likely to require trillions of dollars in new tax revenue." Wait what?  Why are we now talking about infrastructure? Why ...

 My comment at WaPo about the push for recurring checks With the cost of poverty annually over 2 trillion (1 trillion for child poverty alone), this is how you "Pay for it". The question, as Modern Monetary theorists suggest, is not how will you pay for it, but will it achieve the goals, in terms of full employment, reducing the massive costs of poverty, both financial and human, and help close the demand gap.  Universal basic income pilot projects show a wide range of benefits, and virtually no drawbacks; aside from how you pay for it.  But if we get better health outcomes, less crime, less imprisonment, better schools b/c students are fed, secure and ready to learn, the long term costs of the UBI pay for itself.  BUT it is long term; it is an investment in the future. Others disagree and would prefer more a more targeted approach, like increasing the the minimum wage and providing a new deal style federal jobs guarantee.  I personally like universa...