Make Change has the the interview Stephanie Kelton Wants You to Ask: ‘What Does a Good Economy Look Like?’

This particular excerpt addresses my complaint about the MMT (Modern Money Thory) proponents who insist on focusing on one meme that they picj up from other MMT proponents.

Charlotte Cowles
It’s not really your job to explain economic theory to the public. But how can other people—say, politicians—explain the concepts of MMT to voters who many not necessarily even want to listen?

Stephanie Kelton
You’re right, it’s not necessarily my job to persuade average people. But I feel like it’s my responsibility, because when policymakers make decisions that are grounded in a bad understanding of the way government budgets operate, it affects us all. For politicians, the challenge is really on them. Some of them ask me for specific advice on how to talk about debt and deficits, and my first answer is, ‘Don’t.’ The broad public reaction to those words tends to be negative, so my first rule of thumb is don’t bring it up. Do no harm. If somebody poses a question to you, and they inevitably will—‘Oh, what about the debt?’—then you’ve got to find ways to deal with it. I don’t think there’s a cookie-cutter response.

Charlotte Cowles
When you get that question, how do you respond?

Stephanie Kelton
I say, ‘Look, the purpose of the government’s budget ought to be to balance broad conditions in our economy.’ We are so obsessed with balancing the federal budget, but that’s not the right policy goal; the right policy goal is to achieve a good economy. So, what does a good economy look like? It’s not imbalanced like the economy we have today. It’s not an economy where the concentration of wealth is rivaling where we were in the 1920s, where the top tenth of the top 1 percent owns the same share of wealth as the bottom 90 percent combined. It’s not an economy where the median worker hasn’t seen a wage increase in real terms for more than a generation.

It all comes down to this: What kind of a world do we want to create for ourselves? We could eliminate poverty. We could manage our impact on the climate. And if we use the government’s budget to achieve those goals and there’s no inflation problem, who cares if the deficit is 4.5 or 2.1 percent of gross domestic product? That number is irrelevant.