Category Economics

The Atlantic cites a 65-year study indicating that “tax cuts don’t lead to economic growth” (h/t Tom Hickey). On closer inspection, the study finds more specifically that tax cuts on the wealthy fail to promote economic growth while exacerbating inequality.…

Most people have probably wondered, at one time or another, why national currencies gain wide acceptance. Why, for instance, do so many Americans choose to hold and transact in dollars rather than some other currency?

A currency-issuing government is not revenue constrained. It is always able to purchase whatever is available for sale in its own currency. This simple reality is partially concealed by a variety of contrived hoops through which modern day governments require…

Most economies around the world have been in the doldrums since the Global Financial Crisis of 2007/8 and the Great Recession that followed. Unemployment in some European nations has been at levels not seen since the Great Depression. Although the…

In a nutshell, the economy comes down to this: we have available labor time and natural resources with which we can produce some stuff and distribute it. Unemployment now means lost production now that can never be recovered in the…

Often, in trying to get at the “essentials” of how a capitalist economy functions, we consider a simplified model of a closed economy without government. Through such models it is possible to make the argument that exploitation, instability, unemployment and/or…

It was suggested in the previous post that the notion of ‘value of the currency’ adopted in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) seems compatible with Marx’s theoretical framework, provided it is acceptable in that framework to consider a state currency, and…

In Marx’s theory, formulated in terms of the gold standard of his day, the value of commodity money is taken to be the amount of simple socially necessary labor required to produce gold. This treatment of the value of commodity…

Private and public exogenous expenditures have different impacts on the sectoral balances. The same rate of growth in income has varying implications for the domestic private sector’s financial balance (saving minus investment or, equivalently, disposable income minus private spending) depending…

Like many, I embrace the liberal motto “live and let live”. Individuals should be free to think, say and do as they please provided it doesn’t infringe on the liberty of others to do likewise. But living up to this…