Noah Smith

And the MMT people, you know, then Warren Mosler,

The ultimate guru of MMT came out and said, oh, debt's too high now.

We could get inflation.

He just made this pronouncement.

There was no system.

There was no formula.

There was no transparent process by which he made that pronouncement.

But then this accelerated the loss of intellectual currency that MMT had in a lot of people's eyes because they realized that whether debt is good or bad depends entirely on the pronouncements of a few gurus.

That's right.

They have done a lot of yelling of people to not worry about debt.

I would not listen to them if I were you or anyone.

I don't actually know what we will do because politics is kind of unpredictable and I'm not a specialist in predicting what we'll do.

But what we should do is, number one, we need to, once we start worrying about the debt, we need to enact fiscal austerity.

And we did that in 1993.

We did fiscal austerity after a few years of everybody being really worried about the debt.

If you're old enough to remember the, which I think you are, if you're old enough to remember the 1992 election, the candidates were competing to say who could cut the debt more.

And so it's not this idea that politics is this eternal goodie bag where everybody just wants infinite goodies and no one cares about debt is not necessarily right because I've seen the opposite.

I've seen people worry about debt.

I've seen the whole nation worry about debt.

I mean, I was a little kid at the time, right?