text: > Some nations have weakened their monetary sovereignty, either by pegging their exchange rates (e.g., Bermuda, Venezuela, Niger), abandoning their national currencies (e.g., all nineteen countries in the eurozone, Ecuador, Panama), or by borrowing heavily in US dollars or other foreign currencies (e.g., Ukraine, Argentina, Turkey, Brazil).
  > money, as MMT notes, is the one resource the federal government can't run out of. There's no reason every job—all the way down to retail clerk or fast food worker or janitor in a luxury Chicago hotel—can't be a good job, with dignified pay, hours, security, and benefits.
  > the average borrower from the class of 2017 now owes $28,650. For Americans attending private not-for-profit colleges and universities, the average amount of debt is $32,300; for those attending for-profit institutions, the average is $39,950
  > It's been called the forgotten leg of the New Deal. FDR had hoped that Congress would enshrine a job guarantee in the form of an Economic Bill of Rights, but his party never carried through with a formal commitment after his death
  > MMT teaches us that if we have the real resources we need—that is, if we have the building materials to fix our infrastructure, if we have people who want to become doctors, nurses, and teachers, if we can grow all the food we need—then the money can always be made available to accomplish our goals.
  > Budgeting through an MMT lens would have us replace the artificial budget constraint that tells us to live within our financial means with inflation constraint that tells us to live within our biological and material means. ( )
  We’ve wasted a century looking at government as if it were a family or a business. It isn’t. As the monopolist controlling American currency, the government doesn’t ever have to worry about running out of money. It can always fund social security and Medicare, and many other programs besides. Instead of fiscal deficits, we should be looking at the deficits in society, because we can do everything to alleviate them with our currency power and expanded deficits. This is the essence of the powerfully shocking The Deficit Myth, economist Stephanie Kelton’s book on Modern Monetary Theory.
  Written without a mathematical formula or spreadsheets to bamboozle the reader, this most readable book lays out how America came to this point, and how very much more it could do for itself if it would just open its eyes to it.
  Kelton is a proponent of Modern Monetarist Theory, MMT. She learned from Warren Mosler, who pieced it together over a lifetime of observations. She has been researching and speaking about it for decades, with little evidence of success.