Kelton builds this picture into something of a straw man before commencing her attack upon it - that the government must raise revenue before it spends.

Modern governments traditionally raise revenue in one of two ways - they either tax or borrow from the private sector. Kelton begins her book by tackling the conventional story about how governments fund their activities. The book is similarly peppered with personal anecdotes and touching stories about the ordinary people she’s met outside Washington in the Real World(TM) - persuasive to the cocktail set, maybe, but not a manifesto for political revolution. Isn’t climate change terrible? Isn’t inequality bad? Shouldn’t someone do something about declining access to health, jobs and education? The limits of Kelton’s brand of politics are here on full display - as a former Democratic Party staffer, the last four chapters are as dry as you’d expect a staffer’s policy wish list to be. Unfortunately, the back half of the book fares less well - it’s more-or-less a shopping list of ‘wouldn’t it be nice’ progressive policies that anyone who’s read a popular left-wing book in the last ten years (by Paul Mason, Rutger Bremen, Naomi Klein or the like - hell, even my first book) will be familiar with. Kelton is also direct and up front in tackling some of the most common criticisms of MMT. The first four chapters of her book, outlining some of the key ideas of the MMT theory (that is: chartalism, a jobs guarantee, monetary financing and sectoral accounting) are succint, witty, well-argued and powerful.

Kelton is an effective and persuasive writer, and she’s written a popular and accessible introduction to MMT. But here’s the obvious question raised by Kelton’s career: is MMT also an exercise in propaganda? Do she and her colleagues genuinely believe that it’s only “bad reasoning led to bad policy” and that MMT worldview will improve the quality of government decision-making? Or will her legacy be that of a highly effective communicator and propagandist? In the end, does it matter is MMT is true if it succeeds in demolishing ‘The Deficit Myth’ and encouraging political leaders and activists to ask more from their government? are arbitrary procedural constraints on our ability to build a better, more just world. Professor Kelton is quite right when she points out that the legal and budgetary manifestations of this ideology - debt ceilings, pay-as-you-go rules, efficiency dividends etc. It’s a right-wing propaganda exercise that has been so successful as to dominate the strategic imagination of almost all modern political leaders. Deficit hawks - economists, journalists and politicians - who wring their hand at the size of government deficits are not now, nor have they ever, acted in good faith.

The deficit myth kelton