The Washington Post editorial page has been one of the primary MSM outlets for aggressive deficit terrorism. There is an axis of deficit terrorism in Washington DC today. It runs from Hooverite Republicans such as Judd Gregg and Mike Spence, to Blue Dog Democrats like Evan Bayh and Kent Conrad, to media organizations like CNN, WaPo, and the Peter G. Peterson funded The Fiscal Times, to foundations like The Peter G. Peterson Foundation, and Peterson-funded think tanks like AmericaSpeaks, to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), to high-level Administration people like OMB Director designate Jack Lew, and judging by his speech and actions, to Barack Obama himself. This axis has been laying down a carpet of continuous propaganda for many months now distracting attention from the immediate problem of getting people back to work, and toward doing something about an assumed long-term problem, that some argue is fictional, and that many others think may, but, will most probably not, occur

Last Saturday, the WaPo added to its place in progressive infamy with an editorial that managed, in a few short paragraphs, to repeat many of the false arguments the deficit terrorists use to scare Americans into thinking that we really have to cut Government spending as soon as we can or we will be facing unbearable suffering in future years. This post will review that editorial in detail. It begins:

The G20 has dropped its support for fiscal expansion. The deficit hawks are prevailing. But why is that? We all either know or should know that operationally Federal spending is not constrained by revenues, as Chairman Bernanke stated last year, when asked on ’60 Minutes’ by Scott Pelley where the funds given to the banks came from:

“…we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed.”

We know that when the Fed spends on behalf of the Treasury it simply credits a member bank or foreign government’s reserve account at the Fed.

This is the second in a series of posts based on youtubes from a speech in Milford CT by Warren Mosler. Warren is running for the Senate in CT in the Independent Party primary. Unlike both the Democratic and Republican candidates Warren really understands economics and his forté is explaining it to people. Here’s a youtube on his proposals for restoring our economy to normal functioning and to full employment.

In the above video, Nick, otherwise known as The Modern Mystic, has raised an important question about applying Modern Money Theory (MMT) -based economics. He asks whether if all nations used MMT-based economics to achieve full employment, truly universal health care, and free public education for everyone, whether the world wouldn’t run up against resource limits, and whether these limits along with competition for resources from everyone wouldn’t cause resource price inflation?

Put another way, he is asking whether even if MMT-based, or as he calls it, “chartalist” economics, is rational at the “micro” level of the nation, it is also rational at the “sub-macro” level of a world system made up of interacting economies, national governments and interacting sovereign currencies, but no world fiscal authority? Or put still another way, is MMT-based economics, which may be fiscally sustainable in the short run in a single nation, both fiscally sustainable and socially sustainable in the longer-run in an international system of interacting, nations, currencies, and economies?

Deficit hawks in the United States envision a day when the United States Government will go broke, unless we curb government spending on entitlements. Well, governments can go broke in the sense that they can run out of money they need to pay their debts. But not all governments. Only governments whose monetary systems are commodity-based, such as those on the gold standard; those using fiat money, whose official fiat currency is issued by supra-ordinate authorities, and those who owe debts in a fiat currency issued by another governmental authority, can go broke.

But governments issuing their own fiat currency, subordinate to no higher authority, and owing no debt to anyone else in a currency other than its own can never go broke, or put another way, become insolvent. Because all they need to do to spend money is to issue credits to non-governmental sector accounts in banks, and all they need to do to pay back other Governments who have lent them their own currency, is to credit the accounts of the lender Governments in that currency, an action which they have full authority to do, absent any political constraint they have placed on themselves. We call such Governments “sovereign” in their own currency. And because they have this kind of sovereignty, they also have flexibility to facilitate economic activity to accomplish public purposes that Governments without that kind of sovereignty don’t have. But with that fiscal flexibility also comes fiscal responsibility – the responsibility to use the operationally unlimited spending power of an economically sovereign government to use that spending power for public purpose and not for private gain.

The common thread in the three difs I’ve discussed in this part is that they’re all beliefs that counsel false economy and that, to the extent we follow them, lead to less national prosperity and wealth than we would otherwise enjoy. The sixth and seventh difs both lead to less economic activity and higher unemployment; and the fifth dif, in effect, counsels us to forgo opportunities to increase our national wealth through trading. The seventh dif, also, is like the first four in that it is another support for deficit hawkism, and a counsel against deficit spending, that is sorely needed in a time of slack demand and high unemployment. Taking all 7 of Mosler’s difs together, we see the outline of an ideology whose effect is to cripple American potential in both the immediate and the longer term. The 7 difs together constitute a 19th century economic ideology appropriate for a nation with a commodity monetary system, rather than a 21st century economic ideology appropriate for a nation with a fiat monetary system.

The ideas that Government deficits create a debt burden for future generations, take away non-governmental sector saving, and that socials security is broken are all “deadly innocent frauds,” supporting the idea that deficits must be avoided, even if we have to suffer through extreme economic downturns to avoid them. These frauds, like the idea that Government spending is operationally limited by the need to tax and borrow, all serve to reinforce the idea that Government can’t do anything about a bad economy without doing more harm than good. The contrapuntal ideas that Government can create money, and is not operationally limited by the need to tax and borrow, there is no debt burden on future generations that limits production or consumption, deficits don’t subtract from, but add to non-governmental savings, and Government checks including Social Security checks don’t bounce, all reinforce the idea that Government deficit spending is not to be avoided, but, on the contrary is something we can and need to do to avoid the economic and human waste of unnecessary economic recessions and depressions.

New Deal industrial and labor policy is identified as the culprit, not stimulus spending.

Not much, but enough for current current crisis.