About this site

I first came across MMT in about 2018 and thought "this cannot be right!". So, I spent a lot of time studying to find where it was wrong, only to accept that the criticisms of MMT were either non-economic (i.e. political, ideological), or not based on what MMT economists actually say (i.e. people making stuff up about MMT then proving what they made up is false), or simply "MMT does not agree with my text book, so it must be wrong" (i.e. ignoring that maybe their textbook is out of date).

People will always argue around the edges but over time the central tenets of MMT are beginning to be accepted as true, and the assumptions inherent in Neoclassical / Neoliberal economics are being shown to be false.

There is a lot of information about MMT. I found in explaining it that certain small chunks made a difference to how readily new-comers could get their heads around a paradigm that is the opposite of the mainstream view. So I decided to distill it down to the ones I found most helpful.

The relationship between Australian Government spending and suffering in society

My interest is not so much in the economic theory per-se but in the way the Australian Government spends into the economy. In other words, the effect of government spending on the welfare of our citizens.

As just one example: when a government spends A$12 billion per annum subsidising overseas fossil fuel companies, and giving them most of our resource for free (no royalties or taxes to speak of) and then says they "cannot afford" to spend A$1 billion per annum helping to fix the environmental problems caused by the use of those very same fossil fuels, one needs to question the economic understanding of those decision makers.

When we are told "Gee, yes, we would love to spend more on Health / Education / Environment / Housing, etc, but we just don't have the money", but they can decide amongst themselves to spend A$300 billion+ on a few submarines that by all accounts will never materialise, one has to ask about their priorities.

Putting aside the political / idealogical implications of these examples, it was my exploration of the idea that the government "doesn't have the money" that lead me to MMT. Where does the money actually come from and what happens to it when it is spent by the Australian Government? How does it all work?

We could increase the well being of most Australians, starting today

I hope this site helps you understand how it all does work.

While the government does not have unlimited capacity to improve the welfare of most Australians overnight, they have much more capacity than they say they do. And no matter how important "taxing the rich" is for social and democratic reasons, increased capacity to improve the welfare of all is not dependent on "taxing the rich".

Rather than restate all the economic reasons that is so, I leave it to you to watch the videos, read the books, articles, etc, and to decide for yourself whether the politicians of the major parties in Australia actually understand, or care about, how their policy and spending decisions could be dramatically better for the general welfare of most Australians.

Just one example: they say they cannot afford to raise the rate of unemployment benefit (JobSeeker). The usual reason is because they claim it will increase the deficit and debt. I hope after studying MMT a bit you will see that thinking in those terms is economic nonsense and counter-productive to all our well-being.

Keeping hundreds of thousands of Australians unemployed is the desired outcome of the current policies - e.g. interest rate rises. It is not the fault of those made unemployed by those policies. So why are the unemployed being punished for something the politicians are intending? And if the unemployed do need to "take one for the team" for some economically spurious policy reason, why are we not at least paying them properly for their service to the rest of us? Of course, the truth is, they do not need to be made unemployed by policy in the first place. See also: https://aboutmmt.au/job-guarantee