>>>> No he's not talking about that at all. The passage from Marx is about short-term cyclical stuff, not structural deficits of close to 10% of GDP. This is MMT la-la land, where you can just print money without bad consequences. The U.S. government is running a deficit of something like $1 trillion a year. This will shrink as the economy recovers, assuming it does, but it's still facing years of vast deficits. The Fed could print the money if it wanted to, but at some point it'd end up like a Latin American country in the 1970s with a 1,000% inflation rate. We're nowhere near that now, of course, but you can't do that shit forever. When half your deficit is financed from abroad, you actually do have to worry about what your creditors think.
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>>> This is just Austrianism. Why should financing socially desirable expenditure without regard to debt or deficits lead to that inflationary nightmare when the political authority can tighten money (through the Fed's overnight rate target) and constrict demand (through taxation) whenever the economy reaches a state of overcapacity? Meawwhile, as long as the economy is deeply under capacity, deficit-financed demand necessarily raises real incomes without pressure on costs and prices.
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>> This is just poor reading comprehension. "At some point." Can't do it indefinitely.
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> Not unless the economy remains indefinitely under capacity. Otherwise, no reason to do it *indefinitely.* So that "some point" simply doesn't exist.
Krugman and the MMT'ers have had this running debate. For a useful summary and links, see:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/46944145/Paul_Krugman_vs_MMT_The_Great_Debate
Neither side asserts you can print money "indefinitely" - only until the economy reaches capacity and full employment, beyond which inflation threatens. In fact, neoclassicial economists and the Fed, whose mandate is non-inflationary full employment, would also agree - in theory. In practice, however, the issue, as so often, is not a technical but a political one: there are fierce disputes between Keynesians of all stripes and right-wing economists about when that point has been reached.
The corporations and their ideological agents, it seems to me, tend to favour loose monetary policy which lowers their cost of capital and increases the value of their assets, combined with tight fiscal policy (at least in relation to social spending) which doesn't crowd out private sector borrowing and put upward pressure on their taxes and import costs. They favour an unemployment rate which is not so high as to dampen demand and depress growth and profitability but not so low as to raise labour costs. In relation to the latter, US capitalism now appears more willing to tolerate a higher level of unemployment than when production, demand, sales, and profits were concentrated at home, making the big corporations in that period more amenable to contracting with their industrial unions to prevent work disruptions and to attract needed labour.