I get it. You feel that way. But have you considered that the way you "feel" may be dead wrong?
When you or I must buy something, and we don't have the money to pay for it, we first borrow the money, then we buy, and then we pay back our creditor over time. The order is borrowing, buying, paying. Contrast that with the order of events when the government wants to spend and it doesn't have the money. It buys first, then it prints (this is something we can't do!), then it appears to borrow. This is not at all the same order we must follow, and we certainly can' t print! However the government is not really borrowing. It is just exchanging its bond for the money it has already printed out of thin air and spent into the economy. Once this sinks in, you will understand: 1) why there is no national debt, and 2) why technically the government can spend without limit (but don't make the silly mistake of thinking they can do this in actual practice -- because there are real constraints.)
If you continue to take my words out of the context of the overall picture I have painted for you. Then I won't correspond with you any longer. The best thing you could do for yourself is buy a copy of economist Stephanie Kelton's paperback book, the "Deficit Myth". It is written without jargon in a way anyone can understand. I will say that I think she should have called it the "Debt Myth" instead. I consider deficits as being real because I define them as the difference between Treasury tax receipts and expenditures. However Kelton is correct as far as the overall accounting goes. There really is no deficit, from an accounting standpoint, when you treat newly printed money as Treasury income. (That new money is deposited into the Treasury's Reserve Account by the Fed which is covering Treasury overdrafts using, figuratively, computer key strokes. This is , as I have pointed out until I am blue in the face, the fundamental money creation step.) A minor criticism I have of Kelton's Book is that she gives way to much credit to Warren Mosler when she calls him the father of MMT. He did start referring to the detailed explanation of how our government's fiscal and monetary operations work as "Modern Monetary Theory", but most of the work had been done before Mosler by three generations of economists who made it their life's work to understand government money operations, starting with Abba Lerner, whom I personally consider to be the real father of MMT. The discussion in Kelton's book starting at the bottom of page 69 and running through the end of the Chapter is alone worth the price of the book! This you will find to be an easier read than L. Randall Wray's scholarly work "Understanding Modern Money" , which is essential reading for any economist. It's what got me interested in this topic. If you haven't studied this stuff, than you should not be calling yourself an economist, and you most certainly shouldn't be commenting on MMT until you have read what the MMT economists have to say... As Moynihan once said, you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.
