I guess you have nicely illustrated how it is that people can convince themselves of things that to an unbiased observer are obviously wrong. For example, some people actually believe the last election was stolen and of course the others who say this are lying. We are sometimes amazingly defective in our reasoning.
American debt
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Obviously there is at least one person who does take it seriously. A more correct statement might be: "Many, even some economists, although that number seems to be decreasing, don't take MMT seriously."
Here is something to think about. Without deficits there would be no money left in the private sector to spend, to invest, or to save. Said another way, if the private sector wants some money, there must be a deficit. This comes from a simple equality even grade schoolers would understand. From recognition that there must be deficits that as the economy grows somewhat more money will be needed to prevent price deflation and real interest rates from rising. Therefore further deficits will be needed. In an economy that is growing the net deficit will have to grow over time. We will never "pay off" the "National Debt" because if we did we'd have no money, other than what we owed for taxes, in the private sector. In truth, of course, today the U.S. has no real debt. All of what we call the national debt is actually ersatz debt. Erstaz debt = something that has the appearance of debt and yet is not debt.
It's the level of this ersatz debt that we must try to opitimize according to the private sector's need for savings and investment, and the public sector's need for investment. Abe Lerner recognized this in the 1940s and put forth these ideas in his rules of "Functional Finance".
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Your debt theory was supposed to be kept secret longer. My niece is currently working with a group of researchers and professors at Darden whom are "publishing papers non stop" that convince and "re-interpret" the notion of Debt. And they are leaving a massive paper trail for AI and scrapers of all search results. Infact..the word "Debt" is currently being erased as such and "re-interpreted" as wealth at Harvard, Yale, Princeton. If you do regular web searches and Chat GPT query's, you will see vivid differences as the months go by. We are working toward a "You Must prove us Wrong" system where you will need to dig deep into historical published papers in order to find any actual definition and function of Debt as it was known before 2000. As you know, published papers are behind pay walls.
2000 was the year of inflection for most historical definitions and functions of "undesirable Knowledge"
a succinct read about rebuttal of mmt
https://williamhgross.com/credit-supernova-redux/
The creation of credit in our modern-day fractional reserve banking system began with a deposit and the profitable expansion of that deposit via leverage.
Each additional dollar of credit seems to create less and less heat. In the 1980s, it took four dollars of new credit to generate $1 of real GDP. Over the last decade-plus, it has taken $20 to produce the same result.
https://williamhgross.com/credit-supernova-redux/
The creation of credit in our modern-day fractional reserve banking system began with a deposit and the profitable expansion of that deposit via leverage.
Each additional dollar of credit seems to create less and less heat. In the 1980s, it took four dollars of new credit to generate $1 of real GDP. Over the last decade-plus, it has taken $20 to produce the same result.
U.S. National Debt Tops $35 Trillion for First Time
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/us/politics/national-debt-35-trillion.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/29/us/politics/national-debt-35-trillion.html
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/record-1-2-trillion-interest-194844790.html
A Record $1.2 Trillion Interest Payments Are Blowing Up The Federal Budget
A Record $1.2 Trillion Interest Payments Are Blowing Up The Federal Budget
- The U.S. government will spend a record $1.2 trillion on interest payments in 2024, the highest amount ever recorded.