MMT (The Theory)

Lyrics

Let us reconsider the household budget.
The checkbook, the balance sheet, the fear of red ink.
We are told a nation is just a large family.
That it must earn before it can spend.
Let us, for a moment, question this.
For generations, the story was simple.
A government gathers taxes, like a harvest.
Then it spends what it has gathered.
A surplus is virtue.
A deficit, a moral failing, a burden on the grandchildren.
The national debt, a clock ticking towards midnight.
This is the story we have all been told.
But what if the issuer of the currency
Cannot run out of the currency?
What if the creator of the dollar
Can never have a shortage of dollars?
The constraint is not the number on the screen.
The constraint is what is real.
Workers, wood, and wheat. The risk of the fire. Inflation.
Back in nineteen-oh-five, Georg Friedrich Knapp
Wrote of Chartalism, the State Theory of Money.
He said the state names what is money.
And by demanding it for taxes, gives it value.
So the tax isn't to *fund* the government.
No, the tax is to make you *need* the government's token.
To pull spending power from the system, to cool the engine.
Because the issuer of the currency
Cannot run out of the currency.
The creator of the peso, the yen, the pound
Can never have a shortage of the sound
Of its own money being printed.
The true limit is not the number on the screen.
The true limit is what is real.
What can be built. Who can be fed.
So when Mosler, from the trading floor, saw the plumbing...
And Kelton wrote of the Deficit Myth...
They weren't inventing, but reminding.
Reminding us that the scoreboard is not the game.
That a government with monetary sovereignty
Spends first, then retrieves.
The only true bankruptcy is a bankruptcy of resources.
A failure of imagination.
So the question changes.
Not, "how do we pay for it?"
But, "do we have the hands, the steel, the ideas?"
The ledger is a fiction. A useful one, perhaps.
But the world is real.
The world is real.