Here’s a video of an interview that Paris Schutz of WTTW, the PBS channel in Chicago, did on the expansion of the child tax credit. Jeremy Rosen argued for and I argued against.
Funny story: I got on the Zoom and within a minute or two Jeremy got on. I didn’t know who he was, figuring he might be the interviewer. We got into a friendly chat about where he lives, working during the lockdown, etc. Then he said words to the effect, “This Hoover guy is sure to have a different view on this.” I answered, “I am the Hoover guy.”
See how I handled Schutz’s false statement that I’m a conservative. I’ve been playing with how to handle it in the future. Here’s what I’m thinking:
If a conservative is someone who thinks the government should let anyone move here from anywhere in the world as long as he’s not a criminal and not carrying a communicable disease, if a conservative is someone we thinks the government should legalize all drugs, and if a conservative is someone who thinks we should cut the U.S. defense budget by 70 percent, then yes, I’m a conservative.
READER COMMENTS
Jerry Brown
May 21 2021 at 12:43am
You are very telegenic Professor. And you come off as a reasonable and actually quite nice guy- and I think you are. But what would you say to someone like me who doesn’t consider ‘the national debt’ per se to be any sort of problem for us?
I mean aside from immediately saying I’m crazy- cause I’m not. Maybe a better question would be ‘if you assumed there was no problem with the national debt, would you still be as opposed to having our government help families with children by giving them money?’
Christophe Biocca
May 21 2021 at 9:14am
The statement “no problem with the national debt” is a bit vague.
If you mean in in an absolute sense then the problem with “having our government help families with children by giving them money” ($3,600 per child) is that it’s incredibly stingy and complicated. Just give everyone (on earth, no need to limit yourself to the US) a billion dollars, and have a website they can use to ask for more when they run out or want to make a really extravagant purchase. Much simpler.
If the claim is less absolute, for example if you think that debt up to 200% of GDP has absolutely no problems, but things get iffy afterwards, then the question of opportunity cost comes up: there’s a limited amount of total debt you can rack up, so more spending on A means less spending on B-Z. So you’re back to having to make a cost benefit analysis (where the cost is the foregone spending on the best alternative), rather than claiming there is no cost to the program is worth as long as benefits are ≥ 0.
David Henderson
May 21 2021 at 10:28am
You wrote:
I appreciate that very much, Jerry. By the way, I’m not sure of this but I think that’s why Jeremy Rosen thought he could say what he said to me. I’m asking him about his life and he carries a stereotype that a “Hoover guy” is mean so this guy I’m talking to can’t be a Hoover guy. Again, I can’t say for sure that this is true but I would give it a 0.8 probability.
You wrote:
Rather than try to persuade you, I would ask you why you think that. Why do you think that?
You wrote:
I would never accuse someone of being crazy just for not agreeing with me.
You wrote:
Good question. The key word here is “as.” The answer is no. But I would still be strongly opposed.
By the way, I think that Christophe Bioccia, in his comment, makes some very good points.
Jerry Brown
May 21 2021 at 11:50am
Why am I not much concerned with the size of the national debt? Added ‘much’ in there as a qualifier because there could be a distributional problem if say all the interest payments went to a small segment of society that became ever more powerful because of that income.
Anyways, when the US federal government spends more than it takes in taxes it is not similar to what would happen if I regularly spent more than my income. You can easily check one reason if you look at a dollar bill and think about who makes them. I can’t make dollar bills to pay off my debts- but the government can and in a worse case scenario that is what it would do. But it is never going to have to do that- it can always roll over its past debt obligations as they come due- there is a whole system set up to do just that and it does not rely on private individuals or institutions being willing to hold that debt in order for it to function.
So I have been talking about what is the ‘stock’ of past government deficit spending and am almost completely unconcerned with the size of that stock. At the same time, in any given year, the amount of government deficit spending can have a large impact on the economy and our well being. It could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the circumstances. So I am concerned about current deficit spending- just not the past so much.
Matthias
May 23 2021 at 12:35am
You can find plenty of MMT debunking posts on econlog already. Scott Summer did a few for example.
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