Speaker 1: You're listening to Comedy Central, from the most trusted journalists.
Speaker 2: At Comedy Central, It's America's only source for news.
Speaker 1: It's a daily tune when.
Speaker 2: Your host's storting supper and Roddie Jane.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the job. I'm going to clapp and he.
Speaker 3: Is Rodny Change. Hey, Hey, I can speak for myself.
Speaker 3: Can you help me say this?
Speaker 1: Next?
Speaker 4: Bote?
Speaker 5: Definitely can. We got so much to talk about Tonight,
Speaker 5: Joe Biden gets into a fight with Papua New Guinea.
Speaker 5: TikTok might be banned forever, and we find out why
Speaker 5: people are yelling at your car.
Speaker 6: But first, Donald Trump is being gag and tortured. So
Speaker 6: let's watching, you puverts and I'll ongo coverage of America's
Speaker 6: most tremendously wanted.
Speaker 1: The whole thing is a scammed.
Speaker 5: Today it was the second day of Trump's hush money trial,
Speaker 5: and the first witness was the editor of the National Inquirer.
Speaker 5: He testified that to help Trump win the twenty sixteen election,
Speaker 5: he would buy scandalous stories about Trump and then bury them.
Speaker 5: And what a great job he did. I can't think
Speaker 5: of a single Trump scammer, or they could even get
Speaker 5: into that they had to hold a separate hearing to
Speaker 5: find out if Trump violated a gag order when he
Speaker 5: threatened jurors and witnesses, and that hearing did not go
Speaker 5: well for Trump.
Speaker 7: It was a pretty wild and intense hearing on Donald
Speaker 7: Trump's gag order. It all turned into a very heated
Speaker 7: exchange between the judge and Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, who
Speaker 7: argued that Trump is being very careful well a clearly
Speaker 7: frustrating judge. Mrshawn responded mister Blanche, using all credibility with
Speaker 7: this court.
Speaker 1: Minutes after the hearing ended, Trump attacked the judge on
Speaker 1: social media, calling him a kangaroo court.
Speaker 5: Wow, this guy is incapable of keeping his mouth shut
Speaker 5: for two minutes. Has Trump ever considered paying himself hush money?
Speaker 3: But think about it.
Speaker 5: But this is a complicated issue about balancing rights. Basically,
Speaker 5: the prosecution's argument is that a juror has the right
Speaker 5: to feel safe while serving on Donald Trump's jury, while
Speaker 5: Donald Trump's argument is that that juror lives at thirty
Speaker 5: four West fifty second Street, and maybe someone should pay
Speaker 5: that juror visit and straighten him out. This gag order
Speaker 5: is serious. Trump might have to pay up to one
Speaker 5: thousand dollars per violation.
Speaker 6: Yeah, one thousand dollars. That's not gonna stop Trump from talking. Okay,
Speaker 6: you gotta deal with this like any other tantrump. You
Speaker 6: gotta give Trump an iPad with cocomelon on it and
Speaker 6: let him zone out.
Speaker 5: Okay, that he's gonna back Coco Mello and whenever he's upset.
Speaker 3: Okay, Well we'll do that later, all right, We just
Speaker 3: need him to stop now. It's all noise. I can't
Speaker 3: even think in this house.
Speaker 5: Not what doctor Becky would want anyway. For more on
Speaker 5: the results of the gag order herring, let's go to
Speaker 5: Desi Leidich. No, now that the gag order Harry is over,
Speaker 5: they can get back to focusing on the actual trial.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 8: Unfortunately, no, because during the gag order hearing, Donald Trump
Speaker 8: made a jerk off motion, so they needed a gag
Speaker 8: order hearing to see if that violated the gag order
Speaker 8: before they could get back to the first gag order.
Speaker 5: Oh oh, but then after that it's all set.
Speaker 8: Uh No, because during that gag order hearing, the judge
Speaker 8: heard Trump saying I'm judge peepeehead. And when the judge asked,
Speaker 8: did you just call me Judge Peepehead. Trump said he
Speaker 8: was just rehearsing for a community theater production where he
Speaker 8: plays a judge named pepe Head. So then they had
Speaker 8: to have a hearing about that.
Speaker 5: But once that's done, the actual case.
Speaker 8: Yes, but no, because during that hearing, Trump made another
Speaker 8: jerk off motion. But then he said it wasn't a
Speaker 8: jerk off motion. So they need a quick hearing to
Speaker 8: determine how he jerks off, then a hearing about whether
Speaker 8: he made the jerk off motion, then Judge peep Head,
Speaker 8: then the first jerk off hearing, then.
Speaker 5: The gag order, and then the actual case.
Speaker 3: What case, the.
Speaker 5: Hush the hush money case.
Speaker 8: Oh nobody remembers that.
Speaker 5: Keep up with a news.
Speaker 8: Cycle, Jordan, you're at the desk, for god's sake.
Speaker 5: Thank you, Desi. We'll check back in with you later.
Speaker 6: Clearly Trump thinks he's being treated unfairly in.
Speaker 3: This trial, and he's not the only one. Something.
Speaker 6: The gag order is just the start of the oppression
Speaker 6: Trump is facing.
Speaker 9: Okay, Jesse, let me start with you.
Speaker 8: The prosecute says this is election fraud, and they say,
Speaker 8: pure and simple is it?
Speaker 9: I call it pure evil.
Speaker 10: So they've taken away his freedom of speech, and now
Speaker 10: they've taken away his.
Speaker 3: Freedom of movement.
Speaker 10: I mean they had more allowances for college sake.
Speaker 1: Muhammadad Oh.
Speaker 5: Okay, that sounds wild, But I think Jesse Waters is
Speaker 5: a reasonable man because I was kicked in the head
Speaker 5: by a horse last week. So let's hear him out.
Speaker 5: How is Trump being treated worse than the mastermind of
Speaker 5: nine to eleven?
Speaker 10: The guy needs exercise. He's usually golfing, and so you're
Speaker 10: gonna put a man who's almost steady sitting in a
Speaker 10: room like this on his butt for all that time.
Speaker 3: It's not healthy. He needs sunlight, and he needs activity.
Speaker 3: He needs to be walking.
Speaker 10: Around, he needs action. It's really cruel and unusual punishment
Speaker 10: to make a man do that.
Speaker 5: Are we talking about Donald Trump or an old English
Speaker 5: sheep dog. You can't give him grouped up all day.
Speaker 5: He needs time outside or'll pee on the couch.
Speaker 3: Look, we all.
Speaker 6: Know how Donald Trump loves exercise. Because of this trial,
Speaker 6: he's been mobile obese for the last forty years.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, though, would Trump even want fresh air
Speaker 5: and exercise? These actually sound like the punishments the judge
Speaker 5: would give Trump if he's convicted.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, he's a fresh air and exercises. Give me
Speaker 3: the death penalty. But listen, I'll give.
Speaker 6: Jesse Waters the benefit of the doubt because I was
Speaker 6: also kicking the head by the same horse, So let's
Speaker 6: let him continue.
Speaker 3: This isn't law fair.
Speaker 10: It's torture. They're making a seventy seven year old man
Speaker 10: sit inside a dingy room for eight hours straight, four
Speaker 10: days a week.
Speaker 5: Wow, eight hours a day, four days a week. It's
Speaker 5: literally a torture, or, as the rest of the world
Speaker 5: calls it, a job, a part time job.
Speaker 6: To be fair, I mean, this is the same guy
Speaker 6: who's asking to be president of the United States.
Speaker 3: I mean that's gotta be at least a forty hour
Speaker 3: week gig. I mean yes again, over time.
Speaker 5: Also, I thought Trump was supposed to be the young,
Speaker 5: vigorous candidate in the race. Now what he needs sympathy.
Speaker 5: Suddenly he's a poor, elderly man, crippled by the weight
Speaker 5: of his own body, pulverizing his bones into dust against
Speaker 5: the chair. You know what, get that horseback out here,
Speaker 5: because I want to give Jesse one more chance.
Speaker 10: They're telling the entire world all the whack goes this
Speaker 10: is where the former president's going to be at this date,
Speaker 10: at this time, surrounded by high rise buildings.
Speaker 6: Yes, it's very dangerous for people to know Trump's exact location,
Speaker 6: which is why he lives in a nondescript building with
Speaker 6: his name on the front.
Speaker 5: The Trump campaign also tells us where he's going to
Speaker 5: be and exactly when. They're called Trump rallies, and it's
Speaker 5: how I know where to go to get yelled at.
Speaker 6: And you know the worst part about him being on
Speaker 6: trial is that they're just treating him by something. He's
Speaker 6: some kind of criminal defendant.
Speaker 10: Today, the former president of the United States. If he
Speaker 10: leaves court to go to the rest room, jail, if
Speaker 10: he calls the prosecutor, corrupt jail. If Trump moves or
Speaker 10: says anything, they scream jail.
Speaker 6: If he makes us recycling jail, if he scratches as crotch, jail.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he gets a high score on the SAT jail.
Speaker 3: His favorite batman, Christian Bail.
Speaker 5: Yeah, his favorite vegetable, Fred Froz.
Speaker 6: Yeah, definitely not kailled. But he is going to jail.
Speaker 6: He's gonna He's gonna go Joe. Meanwhile, we've done Trump
Speaker 6: trapped in the courthouse. It was a perfect opportunity for
Speaker 6: Joe Biden to seize the initiative and uh, hey man,
Speaker 6: you got the campaign all to yourself, mister president, time
Speaker 6: to press your advantage.
Speaker 1: The Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea has angrily denied
Speaker 1: a false claim by President Biden that his uncle was
Speaker 1: eaten by cannibals during World War Two.
Speaker 11: Those single engine planes as reconnaissance over war zones. He
Speaker 11: got shot down in New Guinea and they never found
Speaker 11: the body because there used to be there a lot
Speaker 11: of cannibals for real. In that part of the GUIDEA.
Speaker 3: You're gonna lose the election.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Look, at some point we all get to an
Speaker 5: age where we confuse our own life story with the
Speaker 5: plot of Indiana Jones. It happened, it happens.
Speaker 3: No, it's true. I mean the man's eighty. Okay.
Speaker 6: We all have grandparents who tell crazy stories like my
Speaker 6: grandfather told me that you once wrestled a mountain lion
Speaker 6: with his bare hands.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And my grandfather told me that she did on
Speaker 5: my grandmother through their entire marriage and had a second family.
Speaker 1: Her grandma. You goof full.
Speaker 6: And can I just say, even if this story was
Speaker 6: true Americans, I no position to criticize how anyone else eats. Okay,
Speaker 6: these cannibals eat people? Yeah, well you know what we
Speaker 6: eat some ways angry just to lose weight.
Speaker 5: Right would a cannibal even eat people out of a wreckage?
Speaker 5: I mean that's their version of eating roadkill.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I know you want you want to eat. I
Speaker 6: passed your raise grass fed humans. And by the way,
Speaker 6: I know the Prime Minister was upset understandably, but hey,
Speaker 6: if someone accused my country of being cannibals, I.
Speaker 3: Just run with it. Like, don't with us. We'll put
Speaker 3: your dick on a Kaiser room down.
Speaker 5: That's fair, that's fair. Anyway. Biden apologized to the papuno
Speaker 5: getting Prime Minister by inviting him to a dinner with
Speaker 5: Pete BOODA judge will be served over rights for the
Speaker 5: balsamic reduction.
Speaker 6: So yeah, before we go, let's shut back in with
Speaker 6: you at the courthouse.
Speaker 3: DESI okay, So any update from the gag order hearing?
Speaker 8: Actually, yes, the Democrats are now asking for a new
Speaker 8: gag order.
Speaker 6: Oh what what did Trump do this time?
Speaker 8: No, they're asking the judge to issue a gag order
Speaker 8: on Joe Biden. It's really the only way to stop
Speaker 8: him telling Uncle Cannibal's story.
Speaker 6: Wait, the true Democrats are asking Biden. Biden has a
Speaker 6: gag or the one that affect his ability to a campaign.
Speaker 8: Yes, At this point, the DNC feels strongly that that's
Speaker 8: his best shot at winning. Otherwise his strongest supporters will
Speaker 8: be Cannibals and that's a dwindling voting block for obvious reasons.
Speaker 4: All right, does he lie like everybody?
Speaker 3: When we come.
Speaker 4: Back, we'll find out the best way to yell in
Speaker 4: your post go away.
Speaker 5: Welcome back to the Dana Show.
Speaker 1: Is a little bill making its.
Speaker 5: Way through Congress this week that could ban TikTok in
Speaker 5: the US.
Speaker 6: And that would be a big loss for a lot
Speaker 6: of people. TikTok isn't just the dancing app anymore. It's
Speaker 6: also one of the main places people go to share
Speaker 6: opinions about the news and culture, opinions like this.
Speaker 12: So little did I know that Taylor Swift was literally
Speaker 12: going to prove the point that I was making in
Speaker 12: the videos that made a few weeks ago.
Speaker 9: So let's talk about the eighteen thirties line in her
Speaker 9: latest song.
Speaker 12: And I also want to do well talking about the
Speaker 12: abortion law in Arizona from eighteen sixty four.
Speaker 6: Yeah, she really just jumped from Taylor Swift to abortion law,
Speaker 6: which means the first two seconds of that video has
Speaker 6: more tonal variety than Taylor's entire new album.
Speaker 3: Am I right, Jordan?
Speaker 5: Don't get me involved in this two times up Taylor
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Speaker 1: What's next?
Speaker 2: People are gonna start identifying as Hamburgers. Well, hold the
Speaker 2: pickles because this guy's Oh.
Speaker 3: Good morning, miss Webb.
Speaker 10: Looks like you preserved a Suzan to go ape shitt
Speaker 10: on Target for pushing the transagenda on children.
Speaker 8: They got t shirts with sprainbows on themsel CD my
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Speaker 9: Worships the devil.
Speaker 3: Great, Great, let's take a look at what we have available.
Speaker 8: Thank you so much.
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Speaker 4: They got those five G tracking devices.
Speaker 6: All we come back, Jephanie could will be joining us
Speaker 6: on the show, so don't go away.
Speaker 1: Oh, welcome back to the DEBI Show.
Speaker 6: Our guest Tonight's a professor of economics and public policy
Speaker 6: and the author of the best selling book The Deficit Myth.
Speaker 6: She's featuring a new documentary, Finding the Money. Please welcome
Speaker 6: Stephanie Calton.
Speaker 5: Dephane welcome, Thank you. It's a fascinating documentary. I will say,
Speaker 5: you are you are setting out correct me if I'm wrong,
Speaker 5: to fundamentally change how people see money. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 5: big ask. And we got about seven minutes.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think a place to start is with right MMT.
Speaker 5: If you can help us defile what MMT is, and
Speaker 5: I think what the narrative the narrative you're hoping to
Speaker 5: get across with MMT. What what is the new economic narrative?
Speaker 5: It's no longer pull yourself up by your bootstraps. What
Speaker 5: is MMT telling us?
Speaker 12: So in economics is widely known as the dismal science, right,
Speaker 12: because well, that's what MMT is trying to do better branding,
Speaker 12: because you know, in the dismal science, it's all about
Speaker 12: scarcity and we can never have the things that we
Speaker 12: want because there's always this really intrusive problem, which is
Speaker 12: how are you going to pay for it? Where is
Speaker 12: the money going to come from? And the problem is
Speaker 12: that we treat money like just any other scarce good
Speaker 12: or service.
Speaker 9: In the economy.
Speaker 12: And what MMT is doing is saying, hold on a second,
Speaker 12: we're not on a gold standard anymore. We have this
Speaker 12: thing called a fiat currency. And it does make people
Speaker 12: nervous because a fiat currency sort of opens up space
Speaker 12: and it's kind of like, wait, is money real after all?
Speaker 12: And so MMT is an economic framework that tries to
Speaker 12: have an honest conversation that talks to people like grown ups,
Speaker 12: not insulting people by telling them that you have to
Speaker 12: treat the government's budget like a household budget and speaking
Speaker 12: down to people, we want to be honest about the
Speaker 12: monetary system we have today, the capacities of the government
Speaker 12: to spend when you have a fiat currency and you're
Speaker 12: not tying your currency to gold and promising to convert
Speaker 12: into something that you could run out of, like physical gold.
Speaker 12: So we're opening up a conversation where there are still
Speaker 12: limits and you still have to make choices, but we
Speaker 12: can have an adult conversation about how the government can
Speaker 12: actually operate its budget when it doesn't face the same
Speaker 12: kinds of constraints that a household or a business face.
Speaker 5: By that, I think that the big headline with this
Speaker 5: as well is the way we look at what the
Speaker 5: deficit means. Correct.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like I hear deficit.
Speaker 5: You're here in the news. You hear every politician talking
Speaker 5: about a deficit equals bad yep. And the major narrative
Speaker 5: of MMT monetary modern monetary theory is deficit good. Correct.
Speaker 12: Every deficit is good for someone in purely financial terms.
Speaker 12: And I'll tell you why, because you're right.
Speaker 9: We use this.
Speaker 12: Word and it sounds inherently like something's gone wrong. If
Speaker 12: somebody is in deficit, there's a problem.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 12: You don't want to turn on the sporting game and
Speaker 12: find the announcer saying that your team is going to
Speaker 12: have to come back and overcome a seven run deficit.
Speaker 9: If they're going to win the game.
Speaker 12: It's always a bad thing, right, But actually, if you
Speaker 12: think about what the government deficit is, it's just the
Speaker 12: difference between two numbers, that's all it is.
Speaker 3: So yeah, RELI, well, I guess we'll find that.
Speaker 1: Fine.
Speaker 12: Fine, it's fine in the sense that it's just a
Speaker 12: benign mathematical like, it's the difference between two numbers. It's
Speaker 12: not even higher order math, right, It's just how many
Speaker 12: dollars the government spends into the economy each year versus
Speaker 12: how many they take back out, mostly through taxation. So
Speaker 12: simple math. If they spend one hundred dollars into the
Speaker 12: economy and they only take ninety dollars back out, we
Speaker 12: label it a government deficit, and somebody records it as
Speaker 12: a minus ten on the government's ledger. What we forget
Speaker 12: to do is to recognize if they put one hundred
Speaker 12: in and only take ninety out, somebody gets ten. So
Speaker 12: the government's deficit is matched or mirrored by a financial surplus.
Speaker 9: In some other part of the economy is.
Speaker 3: Wait, hang on, so did you guys meet backstage or something?
Speaker 3: Because what the hell? What is MMT? What what's MT is?
Speaker 3: What does MT stand for? You hand it?
Speaker 12: So it's modern monetary theory. And so again the currency,
Speaker 12: we're not under the old standard. We're in the modern
Speaker 12: fiat age we have.
Speaker 3: Yeah, what's well is a good car? Thats you get?
Speaker 12: What you're walking around with if you've got some of
Speaker 12: this stuff in your wallet is a tax credit. So
Speaker 12: those dollar bills that we're walking around with, we think
Speaker 12: of that as money, right, and we can use it
Speaker 12: to transact, We can use buy and sell thing. You
Speaker 12: can use it to make purchases of goods.
Speaker 3: And money is good.
Speaker 12: It's good to have generally, and it's really good to
Speaker 12: have when you got to pay your taxes because this
Speaker 12: is what the government expects us to hand over at
Speaker 12: the end of the day.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, money is good. I'm with you so far.
Speaker 9: But let's do this.
Speaker 12: What about that government deficit that you just mentioned, right,
Speaker 12: And I said every government deficit is good for someone?
Speaker 12: Why because it's just a financial deposit into some other
Speaker 12: part of the economy. The question is good for whom
Speaker 12: and good for what. The government can increase its deficit
Speaker 12: to do things like feed hungry kids, tackle the climate crisis,
Speaker 12: fixed crumbling infrastructure. All of those things are ways to
Speaker 12: use a government deficit that might have desirable results for
Speaker 12: people and for the economy.
Speaker 6: So money is good, deficit is good. I'm with your sofar.
Speaker 6: So what's what's the bad? What's the problem?
Speaker 1: You have?
Speaker 12: A big part of the problem is the way that
Speaker 12: we've been taught to think about these things, to try
Speaker 12: to stamp out deficits, to reduce them, to view them
Speaker 12: as inherently dangerous. They're not inherently dangerous, and as I
Speaker 12: just said, they can be used to help us accomplish
Speaker 12: important goals in the economy.
Speaker 6: So, for example, if I go to Caesar's Palace and
Speaker 6: I borrow like twenty dollars in my credit card, I
Speaker 6: put it on red and I lose everything that's good.
Speaker 3: That's bad. Wait, why is that bad?
Speaker 9: Then?
Speaker 3: But doesn't the casino?
Speaker 9: It's good for the casino.
Speaker 5: And also, don't go to Caesar's Palace. That's a little
Speaker 5: ghost person. It's bad. Maybe go to MGM or this
Speaker 5: is something, But financially that's bad for.
Speaker 9: Him, but that's bad for you.
Speaker 12: But the point is to try to figure out and
Speaker 12: to wrap our heads around what it is we're actually
Speaker 12: capable of doing. Because we're always told that we can't
Speaker 12: tackle big problems that we face. We can't deal with
Speaker 12: housing problems, or education, or climate, infrastructure, social security, and
Speaker 12: medicare always come up, and everybody always says the same thing,
Speaker 12: we can't afford it. We have this deficit or we
Speaker 12: have this national debt. Where are you going to find
Speaker 12: the money to do these things? And so MMT comes
Speaker 12: in and says, look, it's not about finding the money.
Speaker 12: The money is created when the government spends, Congress authorizes
Speaker 12: the spending, and if the votes are there, the money
Speaker 12: is there. The thing you have to watch out for
Speaker 12: is inflation. So it isn't as if it's a free lunch.
Speaker 12: There are no constraints, there are no limits. There are limits,
Speaker 12: and the limit is inflation. You can't run out of money,
Speaker 12: but you can run out of things to buy.
Speaker 5: I mean, so this is correct me if I'm wrong,
Speaker 5: But if I'm going nutshell here, your essential argument is
Speaker 5: we're not bartering back and forth like this is an
Speaker 5: avatar for gold in our pocket. The government makes money, exactly,
Speaker 5: they can decide how much money goes out there. Right,
Speaker 5: you pay taxes. They don't need our taxes to fix
Speaker 5: big problems. They can make big money. It's on them
Speaker 5: to figure out how to spend it and put it
Speaker 5: into the economy in a way they can get big
Speaker 5: things done. And then the private businesses, they're the ones
Speaker 5: who have the money. The government just has created that situation,
Speaker 5: and inflation becomes the boundary that they have to act underneath. Correct,
Speaker 5: well done, well done.
Speaker 1: You.
Speaker 5: Yeah, she's a published author and created a movie and
Speaker 5: still assholes won't do the research. But here here, here's
Speaker 5: the pushback.
Speaker 3: Here's the pushback, memorizing the Wikipedia pitch. But here's the argument.
Speaker 5: Here's what's so compelling. And Ronnie is a great he's
Speaker 5: a useful idiot in this, and people are scared. I
Speaker 5: don't know a lot about money, and I think the
Speaker 5: narratives are our money. Teach me to be afraid of it.
Speaker 5: It's something that we shouldn't talk about because I don't
Speaker 5: understand the underpinnings of it. And I think what it's
Speaker 5: compelling about your argument is we can and have like
Speaker 5: World War two, have figured out ways in which to
Speaker 5: create money and fix big problems. It's it's we almost
Speaker 5: need a giant We need a big thing to focus
Speaker 5: on to get those problems done correct, to get the
Speaker 5: narrative around it. Like I think it.
Speaker 12: Helps in COVID was that big thing for a period
Speaker 12: of time. We're governments around the world suddenly stopped asking
Speaker 12: the question how are we going to pay for it?
Speaker 9: And what are we going to do about this deficit?
Speaker 12: And they just pulled out, I'll use the phrase the
Speaker 12: money bazooka, right. Countries realized that they were going to
Speaker 12: have to spend a lot of money to shore up
Speaker 12: people's lives and livelihoods through the pandemic, and so we
Speaker 12: spent some five trillion dollars just in the first twelve
Speaker 12: months or so of the pandemic. And I wish that
Speaker 12: climate was going to be that catalyzing event that kind
Speaker 12: of forces everybody to have that wake up moment and
Speaker 12: realize that we've been focusing on the wrong sorts of problems,
Speaker 12: that we really can tackle the problem of climate change.
Speaker 9: We can afford it. We got to watch out for inflation.
Speaker 6: Sure, okay, sure, So you'll say that MMT can be
Speaker 6: used to solve issues that we claim that we have
Speaker 6: no money for by basically the government making money, because
Speaker 6: that's where money comes from, right, And you're saying, but
Speaker 6: doesn't that increase inflation inherently if you just keep making money.
Speaker 12: Well no, I mean the government has run deficits most
Speaker 12: of my life, with the exception of four years during
Speaker 12: the Clinton administration, the government's budget has been in deficit.
Speaker 12: Look at a country like Japan. They've had large deficits
Speaker 12: every single year for the last thirty years or so
Speaker 12: and no inflation to show for it. And we hardly
Speaker 12: had any inflation. Inflation didn't really become a problem until
Speaker 12: COVID came along and started breaking supply chains, and then
Speaker 12: wars in Ukraine and food and energy prices and so forth.
Speaker 12: But you can have large and persistent deficits without having
Speaker 12: an inflation problem. It's when those deficits collide against the
Speaker 12: backdrop of constraints in the real economy, where the economy
Speaker 12: can't resource, can't keep up and satisfy that demand. That's
Speaker 12: what happened in the COVID pandemic and in World War two.
Speaker 6: So if it happened in World War two and it
Speaker 6: happened in a COVID pandemic where inflation got out of control,
Speaker 6: where we had you had basically a limited spending on
Speaker 6: one single issue World War two. Well, COVID then helping you. Well,
Speaker 6: you know what's evidence that MT you will work? Then
Speaker 6: if we had two real examples, I'm yeah, no, no,
Speaker 6: because someone just briefed me on that, and I'll just
Speaker 6: repeat it.
Speaker 12: So the evidence that it works is that MMT is
Speaker 12: a description of how government finance always operates, whether you
Speaker 12: have a budget deficit, a budget surplus, or a balanced budget.
Speaker 12: MT is at work providing the explanation. So it isn't
Speaker 12: about ramping up deficits and running large chronic deficits. You
Speaker 12: can have a good, healthy economy in some cases, whether
Speaker 12: a relatively small deficit or maybe even with a balanced budget.
Speaker 9: It depends on a lot of other things.
Speaker 12: So the evidence that it works is that it's a description,
Speaker 12: and we think a more honest and accurate description of
Speaker 12: the monetary system we have and how governments actually pay
Speaker 12: their bills.
Speaker 5: Now, as a I guess in theory how this takes
Speaker 5: greater effect and affects our lives, and it's big things done,
Speaker 5: Green New deal that was a big part of the
Speaker 5: way in which we be funded. We need to start
Speaker 5: looking at money like through an MMT lens. Correct. That's
Speaker 5: also presupposes that you do have this paradigm shift that
Speaker 5: we start to see as a as a country, as
Speaker 5: a collective, we start to see the usage of money differently.
Speaker 5: But getting people to have a cohesive change of mind
Speaker 5: and the way they see the world seems like impossibility
Speaker 5: from the experiences I've had out on the road and
Speaker 5: at Thanksgiving, Well, look like, how much of like, do
Speaker 5: we live in a culture where we can experience a
Speaker 5: paradigm shift or is that in and of itself an
Speaker 5: impossible I hope?
Speaker 9: So, I mean, TikTok is there. I'm kidding. I'm kidding.
Speaker 9: We're gonna get better, noe.
Speaker 12: But it's stuff like this, right, It's conversations like these
Speaker 12: that allow people to hear a different perspective. And also
Speaker 12: I think, you know, look what the last couple of years,
Speaker 12: what we've done, in some cases on a bipartisan basis
Speaker 12: and in some cases just with Democrats. But you had
Speaker 12: the Inflation Reduction Act, which is the largest climate bill
Speaker 12: we've ever had in the history of our country. We
Speaker 12: have the Chips and Sciences Act, which big investments in
Speaker 12: actual productive capacity here in the US, and the Bipartisan
Speaker 12: infrastruct Bill, which is repairing roads and bridges and you know,
Speaker 12: taking care of our infrastructure. So those are three big
Speaker 12: packages which I would argue are just an extension in
Speaker 12: many ways of what the administration started doing with the
Speaker 12: COVID spending. And it's just another example of the government
Speaker 12: being able to mobilize the financial wherewithal to commit to
Speaker 12: spending money that it doesn't have, because the money comes
Speaker 12: from the willingness of Congress to say yes. When Congress
Speaker 12: says yes and writes those bills, the legislation is the
Speaker 12: set of instructions that goes to the government's bank, the
Speaker 12: Federal Reserve, and it says we've committed to making these payments.
Speaker 12: Your job is our fiscal agent, is to carry out
Speaker 12: all of the payments we've authorized on behalf of the
Speaker 12: US Treasury. And that is just how government finance works.
Speaker 12: It's no more complicated than that. But we complicate it
Speaker 12: with stories about taxes and borrowing and debt and all
Speaker 12: the rest of it. But at the end of the day,
Speaker 12: the spending is really easy to carry out.
Speaker 3: Well, you see, you're a very smart person. You're saying
Speaker 3: things like calmly.
Speaker 6: Work here, and everything seems like it's fine. So how
Speaker 6: do we get to what would you what can people
Speaker 6: walk away with like if they.
Speaker 3: Want to like not be sad when they look at
Speaker 3: the when they look at the deficit? Is always his question,
Speaker 3: How do I not be sad?
Speaker 6: What's the what's the what's like the practical application? Because
Speaker 6: you'll you'll, I guess we just the three of us
Speaker 6: sat down here and we decided that the deficit is fine,
Speaker 6: and we can well okay, then so okay, so what's
Speaker 6: the next step? Why would you actually, let's say we
Speaker 6: believe in MMT or yeah MT? What what what's the
Speaker 6: next thing? That I mean is belief enough? Do I
Speaker 6: just have to pray to MT and then it?
Speaker 3: What? What has to happen next? Who else?
Speaker 12: What has to happen next is that the people that
Speaker 12: we elect to represent us have to go in there
Speaker 12: and and take decisions using the incredible power that they
Speaker 12: have called the power of the purse that they've got
Speaker 12: to take decisions about whether to fund programs, whether to
Speaker 12: cut programs, not on the belief that they ought to
Speaker 12: be operating their budget like a household. But when these
Speaker 12: decisions come up about social security and Medicare, or continuing
Speaker 12: with the Inflation Reduction Act and staying you know, in
Speaker 12: the game on climate change and going even beyond what
Speaker 12: that legislation did. What I think gives me hope anyway,
Speaker 12: is that we've demonstrated what we're capable of and that
Speaker 12: we can build on it and not revert back to
Speaker 12: old ways of thinking about austerity and the need to
Speaker 12: reduce deficits, because that's when you hammer your economy. That's
Speaker 12: when people have a lost decade. That's when all of
Speaker 12: a sudden, you know, the prosperity that is within reach
Speaker 12: starts to slip through our fingers.
Speaker 6: So when the irs comes from my taxes, I just
Speaker 6: got to tell them, like, y'all, deficit is good, don't.
Speaker 3: Worry about that. Don't worry about it. You need to
Speaker 3: you know what you need to do.
Speaker 5: You need to take some THC or some d MT
Speaker 5: and let the MMT just watch over you, let the
Speaker 5: paradigm shift come to you.
Speaker 3: Ronnie Jack, Yeah, I think I'm in it right now.
Speaker 5: I think, well, finding the money will be released in
Speaker 5: select theaters nationwide and on demand May third. For more information,
Speaker 5: go to Finding Moneyfilm dot com. Seventy Keelton, We're gonna
Speaker 5: take a quick break, right.
Speaker 1: That's how Oh that's your line.
Speaker 10: I think everybody has made their own assessment of President
Speaker 10: Trump's character, and so far as I know, you don't
Speaker 10: pay someone one hundred and thirty thousand dollars not to
Speaker 10: have sex with you.
Speaker 9: Wow, that was Republican Senator Mitt Romney. What a SoundBite.
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