YouSaid · the spoken record

Stephanie Kelton

lines on the record: 100
first: 2025-03-13
most recent: 2025-03-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“He's a professor. He's got an endowed chair in the history department, but as of a month or so ago, he is once again back in the dean's office. He's an associate dean now. So he's doing both.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That conversation I had when I was an undergraduate about where to go to graduate school. And I can remember Randy Race saying, if you go to Harvard, you won't suffer the slings and arrows that you'll suffer if you go to a program like Notre Dame at the time or the new school or something like that. I'll never forget him saying you can avoid the slings and arrows. That was 30 years ago. And I think I didn't take the advice. I went to Cambridge, England, and then I went to the news school. And I have definitely suffered the slings and arrows over many years. I think I wish I had known or understood better just how petty and aggrieved a lot of academics can be.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, where you can actually read interesting thinkers and do more than just, I'll say sterile agent-based modeling and all that. You want the real world in there. You want finance and banking. You know, these people who came out of economic and finance programs ahead of the GFC. A lot of people said, I couldn't make sense of what was happening because we never had any room in our models for finance or banks or credit. We didn't talk about any of those things.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think anybody who wants to study economics should try to find a program where they can get exposed to a broad array of diversity of views, a pluralist program, if you like, something where every class you walk into isn't going to be some version of itself, general equilibrium theory. And that sort of thing, try to find places where As much as you can, you get what might have one day been called political economy.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, like I think people should read Veplin. I think they should read the theory of business enterprise. I think they should read the theory of the leisure class. I think people should read Minsky. I think, you know, stabilizing an unstable economy is really hard to plow through. But can it happen again is a wonderful little book people should read. Anything by John Kenneth Galbraith Right now I'm reading Galbraith's son, James Galbraith, and his co-author Jing Chen have a new book just came out last month called Entropy Economics. So I just started that.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's exactly right. I go back and I consult books now mostly for the purpose of working on this book. But I'm an old school”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, mention John Henry early on. That's an undergrad mentor and then graduate kind of master's. That's Randy Ray I also mentioned. And then Win Godly came after and then Warren Mosler. And those are the four men who I think more than anyone else shaped. Not just my professional life, but in a lot of ways, just my life”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was on an airplane and I'd never heard of the thing. And years ago, I watched, I think they had five episodes available and I just ate them up. And then I came home and said, you got it, you got to watch this with me. I'll start it all over with you. And so a couple days ago, I think season two came out. Huh.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The last couple of seasons. Well, we enjoyed that was okay. We both loved that. And then two nights ago, we started streaming 1923, the second season.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like it was a long, dry spell where we couldn't agree on anything you're talking about streaming like Netflix or whatever. We could not agree. My husband will start something. I watch half of it. I hate it. We stopped. So we went back and rewatched Miss Mazil because he loved that. The first time”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so he leaves, he goes outside, and I see the couple climb out of this little boat and they tie it up to the dock and they go walking up. And my husband's gone for a while and he finally comes back and he says to me, you'll never guess who that was. And I don't know what made me say it, except I knew he lived in the area. I said, Jim Simons. And he said, how did you know that? I don't know. I just. Yeah, there he was, you know I pictured a yacht, but no, it was a tiny little outboard.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did not meet him, but I had a couple of encounters with him. One in particular was kind of funny. I was right in the middle of the pandemic, 2020. I don't remember what month it was, but it must have been reasonably nice out because I was sitting in the house drinking coffee one morning and I happened to look over my shoulder into our backyard and I see, we live on the north shore of Long Island and I see these two kayakers pulling this little dinghy boat up to our dock and they're two older people in the boat and I said to my husband go find out what is going on who's getting towed up to the dock”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so all of those things definitely put a lot of money into people's hands and it definitely helped support consumer spending. And I mean, it modestly increased inflationary pressure. So now I think they're talking about, you know, a $5,000 check going to households, what, 76 or so million households. Yeah, but they're saying, no, don't worry because that money was going to be spent by government anyway, and we're finding all these efficiencies. And so we're just going to let you spend the money instead of letting the federal government spend the money. Problem is the math doesn't work.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a big number. And he said it ought to be 2,000. In fact, he said 600 is like an insult. And he said, I want 2,000 per the individual and 4,000 for family, but he couldn't get it. So he had to settle for the $600 check. And then it was Biden three months later in March of 2021, who came in with the $1,400, which when you add it to the $600 to $2,000, which is what Trump wanted all along. Ironically, it's a lot of the Republicans who are the loudest at complaining about that $1,400 check being the thing that tipped us into the great inflation of the It's never one thing.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so let's remember the first CARES Act was March of 2020. And that package included $1,200 checks. That was President Trump. And then at the end of the year, in December of 2020, you got the $900 billion package. That included a $600 check. That was President Trump. It was after the election, but he's still president. He didn't want to send a $600 check. He was really mad about that. He said he wanted at least $2,000, $4,000.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're talking not just about an extension, but they might have to fiddle with the numbers because they've only given themselves, I'm saying, only given themselves four and a half trillion in headroom on the tax side. So if the president wants things in there like no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime, no tax on tips, well, you're not going to fit that in that four and a half trillion. So now what are they going to do? They're going to go and take a look at some of the corporate stuff, some of the personal stuff. Maybe they go for an extension of three or five years so that they can create a little bit of headroom to add some of these other things. There's inflation potential in that. Now you hear talk of a Doge dividend and $5,000 checks. I mean, we're getting into some serious money here.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So look, I mean, I always think of inflation kind of that's my first stop on the train ride. So I heard a lot of people saying if these tax cuts are extended, it's going to exacerbate the inflation problem. And I say, no, it's not. I mean, come on, right? We're just talking about a continuation of what's been in place already for the better part of eight years and net new stimulus of any kind. So that I set that aside.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The number that gets quoted a lot is that 83% of the benefits went to people in the top 1% of the income distribution. That's on the personal tax.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that we can be fiscally responsible and pay for our spending. And I just think from an MMT perspective, that is not the way to go about it.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you're accurate. We talked earlier about what is the purpose of the tax, and I said the big one is it removes income from somebody. And why would you want to do that? Well, one reason is to make sure that they don't have those dollars and they can't spend them because it helps you regulate inflationary pressure. But I also said you could make changes to the tax code if you have deep concerns about concentrations of wealth and income, if you think things have gotten too extreme. There are things you can do. You can close loopholes. You can think about new ways to raise revenue. You can look at the estate tax. You can look at, and that's a legitimate thing to do or to think about through an MMT lens, independent of how much revenue will it raise. And that's how Senator Warrens, Senator Sanders, they tend to think of these as I need to get money to pay for X, Y, and Z. Rich people have a lot of money. Therefore, let's tax rich people.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do I ensure that my spending is deficit neutral? You're asking, how do I ensure that my spending will be inflation neutral? And that's an entirely different problem for angle budget office, for OMB, for other people who are thinking about and writing federal legislation. You have to approach this in a completely different way.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to get the new revenue from a handful of people at the very top of the income distribution, a corporate tax increase, a wealth tax, a financial transact, whatever it is. They throw all this stuff around. You're potentially opening us up to a huge inflation problem because you're going to broadly spend trillions into the hands of people in the economy while only removing by taxing money from people at the very top of the income distribution. And I look at that and say, this is not fiscally responsible. If you're doing this in a fiscally responsible way with an MMT lens, you're not asking.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely shocking, frustrating, maddening. You got people writing bills, you know, trillion dollar infrastructure bill, a Medicare for all bill of this bill, a budget, a whatever. And the mentality is if you can just stitch up the numbers such that the amount of money you want to spend is offset by savings elsewhere in the budget or new revenue, then you've done your job because now you have deficit neutral legislation and you're good to go and you can go vote and you've been fiscally responsible. And Kelton is sitting in the room going, oh my God, you guys, you know, you're talking about spending, let's say, trillions of dollars into the economy. And let's suppose it was some big, ambitious Green New Deal infrastructure, whatever program, trillions of dollars. And your plan is to completely offset that spending with new revenue.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the big thing that frustrated me when I served on the budget committee was the fact that no one, and I mean not a staffer, not a senator, not anyone on either side of the aisle ever gave the briefest moment of concern, care, attention to inflation.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of the macro effect. So I don't know. This hapazard thing. Do you respond to an email or this is no way to go about looking for smart ways to trim and find efficiencies in government?”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Throws a lot of people out of work, and then through a multiplier effect now we go back to Keynes, it's not just the person who loses their job and now has no income or has income replaced on unemployment at a lower rate or whatever. It's the jobs that are tied to those jobs. And so when millions of people or hundreds of thousands of people, in this case, I guess, start losing their jobs, it means less spending, which means less income for someone else, which means they go on to spend less. I think it was, you'll probably know very better than I will. I think it was Torsten's lock, I think, who put out a note for clients just maybe a week or so ago that said basically 3x, whatever, you know, if you think that 100,000 people are going to lose their jobs, it's more like three. It's three to one, right? You're not just losing that one.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of manipulates the standard Keynesian model in ways that really reflect that deep concern of Keynes's in terms of the role of long-term expectations and liquidity preference and that sort of stuff.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, people use the phrase animal spirits, but they use it loosely to just mean that when people start feeling good, optimistic that it means they're willing to take on some more risk, make more investment, they'd sort of turn it into that where I would say chapter 17 is the most important chapter in the general theory. It's also the hardest one for most people to understand. But that's where Keynes deals with things like the own rates of interest and liquidity preference theory. And that's what I'm talking about. That's very hard to tease out and to bring forward in the ISLM framework. You can argue that it's embedded in the LM curve. It's there somewhere, but nobody.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he got stripped of most of the really interesting stuff when Hicks and Hansen gave us the sort of ISLM interpretation of John Maynard Keynes. It took out a lot of the really interesting, the role of expectations and psychological impulses and all of that sort of stuff. And it became this kind of static, you know, LM curve go up IS curve go down. We pretend we can analyze the economy as having two separate and distinct spheres, a monetary and a real side of the economy. And I just don't think people go back and read the original text. And so the rich stuff too often gets left out.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that was Kane's point, right? The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, which is what makes it so tough to find the entry point to come in and say, yeah, we're here, you know.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I don't know. I think that things have felt awfully bubbly to me for at least a few years. I mean, it was the... the spack craze oh god that's a decade ago i know but it you know these things come and then they transition and then it's the next thing it's you know we did the meme stock thing now we have ai at crypto and uh it it feels tenuous let us i try”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a good question. I definitely agree. We've had longer stretches between them when they've happened, with the exception of, I guess, the fact that I don't know, Barry. I mean, sometimes I feel like Larry Summers had it right, you know, years ago when he said we only know one way to grow the economy. And that's through bubbles, that we get a good run-up in whether it's the SNL period or the dot-com era or the housing bubble, you know, something comes along and provides a nice tailwind and we get a what looks like a long robust expansion, except it's sort of sowing the seeds of its own destruction and then we end up with a recession. But we've gotten very good at cleanup on aisle four. We respond and then we set the table and we do it again.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Monetary policy works by trying to get people to spend more out of the same income, and fiscal policy works by trying to get people to spend more out of more income. It shouldn't be a huge surprise which one tends to be the more have the more potent response”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we ran the opposite experiment. It's just too bad that it had to run against the backdrop of globally constrained supply chains because we don't still have an opportunity to just road test. What if we really just engaged the fiscal lever? And instead of relying so much on monetary policy, which is what we did for the previous three decades, it's just the central banks will take the economic steering wheel and fiscal can mostly worry about just trying to balance the budget or something.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Austerity. They were talking about, you know, what can we do with a commission to try to get the deficit down by $4 trillion at least and all this sort of stuff. And we're looking over at what's happening to Greece and Spain and some of the periphery countries that had a real...”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, you know, I think the men basically said don't listen to Christina Romer. You got to go for something more modest. And then what he did was try to negotiate with Republicans to try to bring some of them on board, didn't get any, but ended up changing the package so that you had about a third of it in the form of tax cuts, hoping to sweeten the deal and pull some Republicans in. Didn't work. And then when it became clear that the fiscal response was too small and voices came back and you had people like Paul Krugman and all kinds of people saying, you know, Congress, you got to get back in there. You got to do another package. By that point, Barack Obama and the economists around him had pivoted to”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Larry Summers, David Axelrod, I think I put in my book, famously said, you cannot be talking about anything that has the tea in it, not trillion. Meaning trillion. Meaning trillion, you're going to give people sticker shock, he said.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moment. She was trying to say this is not going to be your garden variety recession. You can't do some little, you know, tinkering and some modest fiscal package and all of this is going to be in the rearview mirror. This is big, right? And she could see that this had the potential to be the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. And her memo was to encourage Barack Obama to go really big on fiscal. Now, a lot of people have written about this, and there were others in Barack Obama's circle, the guys. Larry Sommer.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, like we were talking earlier about that fiscal package, you know, that $787 billion when he was coming in to office the first time, the wheels were coming off. They were off the economy. And he had people around him. You know, Christina Romer was an economic policy advisor. UC Berkeley professor. She went on to become chair of the Council of Economic Advisors. But she told Barack Obama, this is your holy.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, yeah. I mean, when consumers pull back, right, because the government surpluses are like, they work like a hoover. They're just vacuuming up net financial assets. They're sucking dollars off of the balance sheets of the private sector. That's what happens. And at some point, the private sector cries uncle and they want to spend less and save more. That alone will tend to move.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who were writing about this in real time and saying, Man, this is going to end badly because those government surpluses that everybody is celebrating are being built on the backs of private sector indebtedness that it was the private sector that was spending more than its income, running deficits year after year after year when said it can go on for a while, but it can't go on forever. And when it ends, it's going to be really bad. And of course, we had a recession in 2001, and then the surpluses disappeared. government's budget moved back into deficit. So, yeah, these countries have to figure out some way to generate the demand. And it doesn't have to be from government, but it tends to be the more sustainable way to sort of create enough demand to keep an economy operating in close proximity to full employment.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, barring, and that can be fine, but as the engine of growth, what we've seen is that when you rely disproportionately or sometimes entirely on private sector to generate that growth, it ends very badly. That's basically what happened when Bill Clinton was president and you had the budget, federal budget in surplus for four years in a row, 98 through 2001. The government's budget was in surplus. And a lot of folks looked at that and said, oh my God, we finally did it. Let's celebrate the miracle of the federal surpluses. Isn't this a great thing? And there were people like I mentioned earlier, Wynne Godly.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, it's just what Keynes told us in 1936. It's a lack of effective demand. I don't think it's necessarily the case that it's got to be the government fiscal deficit, but somebody's got to spend more. So how do you do that? I mean, there are two ways to generate this thing we call economic growth. some part of the economy has to spend more than its income. And if the private sector does it, that can work for a period of time, but that generally involves leverage, right? A little bit of credit.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“fiscal deficit so what does that mean it means that they've made a deposit of 1.8 trillion that's a financial contribution that goes into the broader economy and we can then talk about you know where it goes and what good it's doing in the economy but taxes are important because they pull money out and are one potential way to regulate inflationary pressure. Obviously, they can be used, make changes to the tax code if you care about the distribution of income and wealth and you want to make some kind of change because you think things have gotten too concentrated or you can use it for incentivizing and disincentivizing behaviors. But the big one is regulating inflationary pressure.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think of taxes or the role of taxes as generating revenue that the government needs in order to pay the bills. So what do taxes do? Well, they subtract money from the rest of us. So every dollar that's taxed away from you is a dollar you don't have and you can't use to chase after goods and services in the economy. So one important function of taxes is to reduce purchasing power in the non-government part of the economy, right? So consumers, businesses have less to spend. That makes room for the government's own spending so that it can spend money into the economy without creating inflationary pressure. So right now, what the federal government this last fiscal year spent, let me just use rough numbers, let's call it seven trillion, right? And collects 5.2 trillion in taxes and other revenue, mostly from taxes, to get a $1.8 trillion.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So, but he's still thinking of tariffs as a revenue source. So he just wants to change the allocation, where the revenue comes from. I don't think he's thinking that, you know, that taxes or tariffs don't generate revenue, that the federal government, in a sense, needs to pay the bills. So what I'm saying is for the federal government,”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While taxes are for subtraction, that's how I think of it. I don't think at the federal level, I don't think of taxes for revenue's sake. Really? Yeah. I know it sounds...”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and would truncate the downturn, it would replace income or a portion of income, probably not replacing full income for most people who lose jobs, but it would be a very powerful automatic stabilizer. Those people could transition into paid work. They'd have a job record, future employer could call and say, what kind of work is buried? Does he get there on time? Does he pick fights with his coworker? Is he a pretty good guy? And then as the income is supported and the economy begins to recover, those people can transition back into private sector jobs. So it works like a very powerful buffer stock, like a cushion for the economy through the business cycle.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I think unemployment had a three handle before the pandemic hit. That would have been an outstanding time, my opinion, to introduce a program like this, right? Because the take-up rate would have been relatively small. Would have been cheap to do. Yeah. So you put it in place then. And for people who say, sometimes people say, well, there was no unemployment. I say, great, then that's exactly the right time to do it. And now whatever you're willing to pay and say that you're willing to hire people. And if no one shows up, that's just fine, right? But now the policy, you've stood up the policy and the program is there so that when an event like COVID happens, you don't have to throw 20, 30 million people into the ranks of the unemployed. You can transition people from the job that they're about to lose into some new job.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it means that if you truly wanted to eradicate, I mean big thinking, right, involuntary unemployment. What is involuntary unemployment anybody who wants a job is ready, willing, and able to work, but can't find a job, you're involuntarily unemployed. Suppose you had a Policy whereby you said the federal government will fund a job for anybody who wants to work, wants to contribute, can't find work anywhere else in the economy at some base wage, maybe benefit package, you have a federally funded, locally administered job, right? You can contribute. You could eliminate involuntary unemployment. I'll say quote unquote overnight, right? Once the policy is announced and you're prepared to Provide the jobs for people to have actual things for them to do, Anybody who's still walking around without work is voluntarily unemployed.”
2025-03-13 · Masters in Business · US Fiscal Policy and the 'Deficit Myth' with Stephanie Kelton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source