Warren Mosler has an important forthcoming book called The Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds, which is, fortunately, available right now in a pre-publication version for reading and commenting from Warren’s site.

Jamie Galbraith, Warren’s friend and occasional co-author has recently written a Foreword to the book, which also can serve as a Foreword to the Modern Money (or Monetary) approach to economics. I think the foreword is important enough in itself that I decided to comment on it. That commentary is the subject of this blog post. I’ve arranged the post as a series of quotes and additional, hopefully, value-added, comments on what Jamie said.

James K. Galbraith’s short piece in The Washington Post Outlook section proposed that we ought to toss the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). I couldn’t agree more. This post is a commentary intended to amplify the argument.

Jamie begins with:

”The forecasts of the Congressional Budget Office are holy writ in Washington, and they fuel scary headlines about an impending federal debt disaster. This is a shame, because the CBO’s projections are indefensible, internally inconsistent and economically impossible.”

ND2.0 bloggers Marshall Auerback and L. Randall Wray prepare to confront neoliberal propaganda and deficit hysteria at this D.C. teach-in.

Warning: At the end of this diary, I’m going to be asking for your support. Your financial support. Please consider making a donation today.

I know that time is short between now and April 28th. But nevertheless, I propose that we organize a counter Fiscal Summit “Teach-in” Conference in Washington DC, on that day. Such a “teach-in,” depending on how many people we could get to attend, could steal media attention from the Peterson-sponsored event, and introduce an opposing narrative to the ones coming out of the deficit hawk events on the 27th and 28th. To have such a Conference would take money. Speaker expenses would have to paid, as would hotel expenses if it were possible to get a hotel site at this late date. On the other hand, it would not be hard to think of high-level speakers for such a Summit. Here’s my list of speakers who could do a really good job delivering a Modern Monetary Theory counter to the neo-liberal paradigm: L. Randall Wray, William K. Black, James K. Galbraith, Warren Mosler, Marshall Auerback, Bill Mitchell, Rob Parenteau, Yeva Nersisyan, Scott Fullwiler, and some other very good top-level participants who would question the neo-liberal paradigm to at least some degree are: Yves Smith, Simon Johnson, Joseph Stiglitz, Robert Johnson, Robert Reich, Robert Kuttner, and Dean Baker. Finally, someone who ought to be invited, since he’s expressed frequent and very explicit criticism of the neo-liberal paradigm is George Soros. It would be valuable to get him into direct discussions with others on the relationships between hedge fund traders and nations with unencumbered fiat monetary systems.