The post on New Economic Perspectives comes in two parts. Part 1 – Is an Anti-Austerity Alliance of Left Neo-classicals and Post-Keynesians Possible? Is it Desirable? and Part 2 – Is an Anti-Austerity Alliance of Left Neo-classicals and Post-Keynesians Possible? Is it Desirable?

From part 1 is this excerpt:

The advice of MMTers to progressives is to prioritize what government should spend money on and put forward those demands without linking them to the amount of taxes collected in countries that control their own currencies such as the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan and China. Secondarily, some in MMT might suggest using taxation as a means for shaping economic behavior and regulating economic inequality, uses of taxation which are considered commonsensical among economists of most schools and political tendencies.

These posts are like a Russian novel. It is hard to keep all the players straight between their atual names and the categories the author puts them in. Also like Russian novels, the post is worth reading if you are really interested in the topic.

A little bit of clarification emerged for me when I read this excerpt from part 2.

The non-economist progressive public sphere, such as it is, is in awe of Paul Krugman but Post-Keynesians and MMTers continue to find critical flaws in his reasoning and model of how the economy works.
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An example of reality vs. unreality and stakes involved revolves around widely divergent theories of banking, debt and loaning money. Critically important in this era of politically overpowerful, mega-banks devoted to casino-like speculation on asset prices, is an understanding of what banks actually are and how they might be regulated or transformed to serve the greater good. The largely Post-Keynesian theory of endogenous money supported by a set of empirical observations of how banks and credit-creation works, suggests that banks create money by lending it and that lending occurs independent of reserves in the bank. Banks have social “license” to lend and use it when they see the potential for profit and loan amounts are not drawn on money in their accounts but the loans create money.  This license is a source of political and economic power, enabling banks to drive and shape the economy and the amount of money in circulation by lending or not lending as the case may be.    Neoclassicals of the Left and Right deny that this license exists and instead see lending as driven by reserves, a crude “piggybank” model of bank lending with bankers as transparent intermediaries.  Krugman and other have started to equivocate on this matter but still do not accept that changes in credit/debt add to or subtract from aggregate demand overall.

Perhaps the biggest value to me of my having posted this is to provide me with a reminder to go back and reread the original posts, try to understand some of the complicated sentences better, and follow up on the many links in the articles.