The Independent has the story America denies Puerto Rico request for waiver to bring vital fuel and supplies to island.

The Trump administration on Tuesday denied a request to waive shipping restrictions to help get fuel and supplies to storm-ravaged Puerto Rico, saying it would do nothing to address the island’s main impediment to shipping, damaged ports.

Naomi Klein has written a book to describe the type of thing Trump is doing. The book is titles The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

I have written a number of posts about this book as far back as 2008 – The Shock Doctrine in 2010, The Shock Doctrine in 2008, Trump’s Shock Doctrine in 2017, Harvey Didn’t Come Out of the Blue. Now is the Time to Talk About Climate Change in 2017. You can search this site for Naomi Klein to find more posts.

YouTube has the video Bernie Sanders Reacts & CRUSHES Trump’s New Tax Reform plans 9/27/2017.

Bernie has an excellent message here.

Personally, I posit that tax cuts for the wealthy actually harm the economy. The tax cuts do not create more jobs for American workers, they actually cut jobs for American workers. American workers with money to spend is the foundation of consumer demand that drives the need to hire people to fulfill that demand. If we shift even more money from the workers to the ultra-rich, there will be even less consumer demand, and less need for workers to produce goods and services.

In another Sanders sponsored video, there is the empirical evidence that Corporate Tax Cuts Don’t Create Jobs. His video doesn’t try to give an explanation as to why this is. My explanation above is nothing more than Keynesian economics.

Business Insider has the article IT’S HERE: All the details of Trump’s massive tax plan. Here is an excerpt from the article with a few liberties taken by me to adjust the content to be more truthful.

“Too many in our country are shut out of the dynamism of the US economy, which has led to the justifiable feeling that the system is rigged against hardworking Americans,” the nine-page plan reads. “With significant and meaningful tax changes, we will create a system that accentuates the rigging. If you think the rich have been draining money out of the economy before, just wait to see what they will be able to get away with after we make things worse.”

The rich already take too much money out of the economy. They rake in the money, but as John Maynard Keynes explains, there are no real assets worth investing in due to lack of consumer wealth to demand more product. Instead, the wealthy put money into things like elevating stock prices which companies use to buy other companies or sock it away for future use. They buy other companies to eliminate competition. They strip the assets from these companies, and then shut them down. This does not create jobs.

We need to keep this money out of the hands of the idle rich, or take it back from them in taxes, and put the money to use in the economy by investing in our future and putting the money in the hands of people who would spend it to restore consumer demand.

Senator Bernie Sanders has posted his thoughts on the tax cut proposal.

At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, President Trump’s tax plan is morally repugnant and bad economic policy.

His post refers to the NBC story GOP Plan Cuts Corporate, Individual Taxes and Repeals the Estate Tax.

Normally, raising taxes is not thought of as a way to stimulate the economy. However, in the current circumstances, taxing away some of the money from the rich who do not use that money to stimulate the economy, and putting it to better use in stimulating the economy would actually be a net benefit to reviving the economy. I am not saying this is the only way, or necessarily the best way, but the argument is a good counter-weight to Trump’s belief that tax cuts will stimulate the economy. Tax-cuts under the current circumstances will only put the economy into a deeper sleep.

Naked Capitalism has the article Jared Bernstein Shows the Costs of Not Understanding Sovereign Currencies.

The Republican and New Democrat deficit strategy is to force Democrats to make an endless series of “Sophie’s choices.” Choose which excellent program to kill in order to save (temporarily) another from the chopping block because we supposedly cannot afford to provide both. Then repeat the process. The Republicans and New Democrats constantly, and falsely, claim that the federal government cannot afford to provide medical care availability that is routinely provided in most of Europe and Canada. It is a pure myth that the United States cannot afford to provide the safety net of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

I certainly believe the MMT (Modern Money Theory) explanation of how the monetary system works, but I have come to realize that there are a couple of important factors that MMT proponents ignore. My issues do not invalidate the gist of the above article, but I feel it necessary to get the MMT experts to address my issues. Doing so can only increase the credibility of MMT.

One factor is the belief that the money created in the private sector by lending is somehow always a less important economic force than money created by the sovereign power. The accounting balance of assets and liabilities (money lent and obligation to repay) is a static balancing. The economy is dynamic, however. Money lent can be spent immediately. The obligation to repay is in the future. In the time span between when the money is lent and when it must be repaid, there is a lot of economic activity going on. The effects of this cannot be ignored.

The other factor is mark-to-market valuation of assets. I’ll defer discussion of that to a later comment.

There is plenty of evidence in economic history, both recent and not so recent, to demonstrate the importance of the two factors mentioned above.

I would love to see a discussion of both factors by the MMT theorists.

Keynesian explanations of why monetary policy is not the only factor driving the economy still apply after all these years. After all, these too are just explanations of how things work whether you choose to act on that knowledge or not.