The coronavirus came, and Congress started spinning out multi-trillion-dollar spending bills, without any of these so-called “pay fors.” We had to act! And that meant adding to the deficit to fight the pandemic. We spent a year arguing about where the money would come from, and then suddenly the world opened to a new reality. This is happening on the heels of a Democratic presidential primary, where we spent the better part of a year listening to candidates put forward their agendas and, at every turn, getting dogged by the question, “How are you going to pay for it? Where is the money going to come from?” Every presidential contender-from Bernie Sanders to Amy Klobuchar-bent over backward to show how they would “pay for” their proposals without adding to the deficit. Since March, Congress has committed roughly $3 trillion to deal with the economic fallout related to the pandemic-all of it will add to the deficit-and they’re getting ready to add even more. Before the coronavirus pandemic, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) was forecasting deficits in excess of a trillion dollars a year for the foreseeable future. Stephanie Kelton: You captured the backdrop. What does your book have to say to the current moment? And we’re heading into an election where polls indicate that much of the American public believes that we have to address an unsustainable national debt and budget deficit. We are on the verge of catastrophic state and local government cutbacks. The virus is still spreading in the United States, which will lead to more shutdowns and more unemployment.

There has been a $3 trillion government response, much of which is expiring. Almost 50 million people have applied for unemployment insurance since the COVID-19 pandemic started. If we don’t get the issue of the deficit right, we get almost nothing else right. Mark Levinson : Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the Peoples’ Economy is a foundational book on economic policy.

The deficit myth stephanie kelton