Here’s a good post on the current sorry state of economic policy in the US and Europe: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/obsolete-dogmas-are-crippling-the-world-economy-2014-11-14?page=2
The author, Darrell Delamaide, gives a shout-out to MMT:
MMT, which bases models on the reality that the U.S. dollar is a fiat currency created out of thin air through government spending, represents a Ptolemaic revolution for flat-earth economists mired in an 18th-century view of the world.
Short of a full-fledged catastrophe overtaking us, however, neither the political establishment nor the public are ready for this radical a change…. In the meantime, we will continue to suffer the travesty of citizens in the two richest economies in the world, the U.S. and the EU, thrust into poverty, stress, and lower standards of living by bumbling politicians using obsolete paradigms for understanding how the world works.
In the piece, he (correctly) attributes the fiscal hawk position to wayward morality–as if there is something immoral about a government deficit. There is only one scientifically justifiable position on government budgets: Abba Lerner’s Functional Finance approach, or what is now called the Deficit Owl view. A government’s budget should be formulated with a view to achieve the public purpose. The ex post budgetary outcome–whether surplus, deficit, or balanced–should never be a goal and should never be a measure of success.
Sure, we need an ex ante budget to prioritize, to allocate real resources, and to hold project management accountable. In some cases, it might even make sense to loosely link government spending on some projects to certain tax sources (bridge building to gasoline taxes or tolls). But there is no sense in gauging government policy effectiveness against the difference between total government revenues and total government spending.
Foregoing needed infrastructure, healthcare, pensions, education, housing, policing, or defense on the pretense that a sovereign government “has run out of money” (as our President says all the time) is just plain stupid. If we have unemployed resources domestically (or can hire and purchase them from abroad) then we can “afford” to put them to use.
The deficit hawk–and dove–stupidity is literally killing people. These are entirely avoidable deaths.
One more link: http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/11/10/pow-zap-wham-get-ready-for-comic-book-economics/. Yep, a comic book to present Steve Keen’s economics. MMT also got a mention. I’ll let you judge whether that’s a good thing or not.