“The kind of transformation that is now required [to address the climate crisis] will happen only if it is treated as a civilizational mission, in our country and in every major economy on earth.”
― On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal by Naomi Klein
Let’s start this week’s GIMMS MMT Lens with some good news! It might be from across the pond, but it is heartening to learn that this week John Yarmuth, Chair of the House Budget Committee, spoke on public television about the federal budget using an MMT framework. He explained that the US government is not money constrained and mentioned Stephanie Kelton’s book The Deficit Myth. Is this a defining moment? Can we make further progress within the ever-shortening timescale to address the key challenges the world faces? Let us hope so.
The deficit hawks and doves that have hitherto ruled the roost, basing their ideas on the false premise of monetary scarcity, will surely have to acknowledge the reality of how governments like the US and the UK actually spend? Unless they want to find themselves in the dock for wilful harm.
The challenges before us are vast; from addressing the climate emergency to the existing and growing global inequalities that have been driven by the toxic economic system which prevails and dictates policy around the world. Watch this space!
At the same time as Yarmuth revealed the truth about monetary reality to a US public who, like many, have been coached to believe that the state money system operates like their own household budgets, in the UK we still have politicians pulling the wool over the eyes of its own citizens.
In an interview with Andrew Neil on the newly launched channel GB News, the Chancellor Rishi Sunak suggested that we would have to take some difficult decisions to get the public finances back on track. He claimed, disingenuously, that in order to deliver the Tory manifesto of ‘more nurses, more hospitals, police officers, levelling up and investing in local communities’, they had had no option but to cut foreign aid, because apparently the government has a finite pot of money. Harking back to Margaret Thatcher’s lie that ‘There is no such thing as public money. There is only taxpayers’ money’, he said:
“Of course, I’m a fiscal conservative because it’s not my money, it’s other people’s money and I take my responsibility for that very seriously.”
“All governments have choices to make. [We are] making sure that we can invest in our children’s future and not have them constantly paying for the past.”
Apparently, even in the midst of the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced, one which affects both rich and developing countries, we still have politicians falling back on the lie of monetary scarcity; thereby suggesting that saving ourselves is unaffordable.
Politicians who claim that the choices governments have are limited by the tax they collect or their ability to borrow, and that balanced budgets should be the aim of spending policy to avoid a debt burden on future generations, are misleading the public. Either through their own ignorance (debatable perhaps given the growing awareness of monetary reality) or more likely with the objective of driving through a political agenda favouring global corporations, whereby the State has become a cash cow for their operations. All at the expense of publicly funded and provided services that serve the nation’s interests.
The last 10 years have been a case in point, as austerity drove cuts to government expenditure on public and social infrastructure, on the basis of the lie that there is a limited pot of money with which to deliver government policy; resulting in a decaying infrastructure and severely impoverished sections of society. What a terrible price we have paid.
At the same time as Sunak promoted his fiscally conservative credentials, Labour, under the newly appointed Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves, announced that the country had ‘lost’ £16.7bn in tax revenues over nine years due to slow economic growth caused by government policies, and compared the amount that could have been in the Treasury ‘coffers’ had the UK grown in line with the OECD average.
The Shadow Chief Secretary Bridget Phillipson referred to ‘a decade of misspending of public finances and waste’, which she said had ‘weakened the foundations of the UK economy and severely hampered Britain’s growth’. And indeed, one might make a very good case for criticising austerity, which cut public services to the bone on the false premise that it would grow the economy, a premise which has been exposed as a cruel falsity, both in the light of its consequences and also of the vast spending that has been undertaken by the government to keep the economy from tanking during this pandemic, when up till that point successive Chancellors were promoting fiscal discipline. However, setting aside the drive for growth for the moment (we will come back to it) Labour is still talking about taxes funding spending. What’s changed? Growth may indeed increase tax revenues, but those increased tax revenues have absolutely nothing to do with paying for government spending, paying down the national debt, reducing a debt burden on future generations or whatever other nonsense is masquerading as fiscal correctness.
If we genuinely want to address the climate emergency and the vast global inequalities that exist, it’s a story that needs to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
And as for Treasury ‘coffers’, the government doesn’t have any. None of this narrative is true. It represents the continuing smoke and mirrors of monetary scarcity played out daily by politicians, the media, and orthodox economists. As was pointed out this week by an MMT activist, if everyone knew how the money system worked the UK Chancellor would never get away with the austerity nonsense pedalled by his predecessors and other politicians for the purpose of delivering a political agenda, and which has done so much damage over the last 10 years to the UK’s public and social infrastructure.
The government, as the currency issuer, has as much money as it needs to deliver its political agenda within the context of available resources. That is its only constraint. It does not rely on growth to fund its spending through the increased taxes such growth might bring. In plain speak, the government is not a household and is not constrained in its spending priorities either by the tax it collects (for vastly different purposes) or by borrowing. It needs to do neither. Such narratives are deliberately constructed to justify the pursuit of a damaging economic ideology that has been exposed by the pandemic as unnecessary and indeed vastly harmful.
That should be the starting point for the public conversation on what comes next, not whether the government has been fiscally prudent by balancing its budget or needs to cut back its expenditure to do so, however appealing that message is to a public still firmly ensconced in its household budget comfort zone for understandable reasons. If you hear the narrative enough times, you come to believe it must be so. We must therefore double our efforts to challenge and unpick the false narratives. Much depends on it.
Last week the G7 met in Cornwall and showed yet again not only its myopic, status quo vision for the future, but also its contempt for the pressing challenges we face. As world leaders flew in from around the world, the Prime Minister arrived in Cornwall after a short carbon-intensive flight from London, whilst laughably at the same time lauding his commitment to addressing climate change with his usual hypocritical bluster. It was also revealed that trees were cut down to provide meeting rooms for the heads of state who were there to address the climate emergency, amongst other things. Those very same trees which play a vital role in planetary health!
The final communique detailing the deal that had been struck by G7 leaders was criticised heavily for its failure to bring new cash to the table. The Build Back Better mantra vaunted by politicians and global institutions such as the World Economic Forum and the World Bank, is nothing but a toothless symbol defined by empty political rhetoric.
Max Lawson from Oxfam said of it, ‘Never in the history of the G7 has there been a bigger gap between their actions and the needs of the world. We don’t need to wait for history to judge this summit a colossal failure, it is plain for all to see’. A rich nation’s club in service to a rotten economic system at the expense of the well-being of the planet and citizens across the world.
The G7 jolly, in which guests were wined and dined in luxury, also showed huge disrespect for a region impoverished by government decree, and the local inhabitants whose lives were disrupted to accommodate the event. A symbol of everything that is wrong with the global economic system. You couldn’t make up this nonsense! The huge chasm between words and actions is getting wider and wider, as the climate realities continue to bear down upon us and are reported on almost daily. From the report this week that despite the slowdown in air travel and industry over the past year, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere reached 419 parts per million in May – the highest measurement of greenhouse gases that have been recorded in the 63 years covered by the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Observatory in Hawaii, to the UN’s warning that urgent action is vital to address the growing global problem of drought which is affecting both developing and developed countries.
In the words of Mami Mizutori, the UN Secretary for disaster risk reduction,
‘drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic and there is no vaccine to cure it. Most of the world will be living with water stress in the next few years. Demand will outstrip supply during certain periods [and will be] a major factor in land degradation and the decline of yields for major crops’. Mizutori went on to make it clear that ‘Human activities are exacerbating drought and increasing the impact threatening to derail progress on lifting people from poverty.’
The United Nations World Food Programme has warned that unprecedented levels of drought across many African countries are threatening human existence in those areas, as land becomes parched and consequently infertile, and famine takes hold.
California and Arizona have been hit by multiple wildfires this week; hundreds of thousands of acres have burned as long-standing drought continues to affect the area. Scientists referring to it as a ‘mega drought’ say that it should be a wake-up call, as water resources providing crucial supplies to 40 million people and feeding the needs of agriculture are at risk, and may force drastic and perhaps unpalatable action. The nation’s largest reservoir is on track to reach the lowest level ever recorded. Cities like Las Vegas are baking in temperatures reaching historic highs and researchers are predicting that this heatwave will be one of many likely to hit the US South-West before summer ends.
In the UK, the government has equally shown disregard for the growing threats as a result of the climate crisis and continues to learn no lessons.
The 2016 report on Exercise Cygnus which simulated the consequences of a fictitious influenza pandemic, warned that ‘the UK’s preparedness and response, in terms of its plans, policies, and capability [was] not sufficient to cope with the extreme demands of a severe pandemic that will have a nationwide impact across all sectors.’
It should therefore not be surprising to learn that the same is true of the Climate Change Committee’s risk assessment on climate crisis preparedness, also published in the same year. The 2016 report warned that the UK was poorly prepared for water shortages and floods. In 2019 it repeated its warning that the UK still had no proper plans for protecting people from heat waves, flash flooding and other damaging impacts arising from climate change.
The government responded that it ‘welcomed this report and will consider its recommendations closely as we continue to demonstrate global leadership on climate change ahead of COP26 in November’. It is difficult to know at this juncture whether to laugh or cry. Just more bluff and lies from a government which promises lots and delivers nothing.
As US President Joe Biden plans a huge fiscal injection to revitalise his country’s decaying infrastructure, which has arisen over decades through the overriding obsession of both Houses with balanced budgets and neoliberal dogma, our own over-privileged Chancellor is still bamboozling people with his nonsense about being a safe pair of fiscal hands. The only conclusion one can draw is that balanced budgets must trump human survival.
As the economist Daniela Gabor wrote in a recent Guardian article:
‘Climate activists should be prepared to fight the battle against fiscal fundamentalists with a simple message: the government is not a household.’
Also writing that:
‘We cannot rely on private finance to lead us out of a climate crisis it has systematically contributed to. We have to disempower carbon financiers, and we do that by making the democratic state – not investors – lead the way forward.’
The government has the capacity to be the real powerhouse in terms of both its currency-issuing and legislative powers, and contrary to popular opinion is not beholden to corporate dictat. Equally, in a truly democratic state as the economist Professor Bill Mitchell says, ‘The government is us’. We could be the real arbiters of change through our votes.
However, currently we have a democratic deficit reinforced by a toxic media which, as Raoul Martinez, the philosopher, artist, and filmmaker so rightly notes:
‘As long as the vast majority of wealth is controlled by a tiny proportion of humanity, democracy will struggle to be little more than a pleasant mask worn by an ugly system.’
Whilst the data shows that the world’s wealthiest 1% produce double the combined carbon emissions of the poorest 50%, and the Musks and Bransons of the world obscenely seek to exploit finite resources for thrill-seeking trips into outer space, such wealth inequality and unequal access to real resources are a degrading consequence of ceding power to the unelected, whose wealth buys them political influence.
We should instead be looking at how we reduce consumption of those same finite resources and at the same time put those we have to better use by creating a fairer and more sustainable planet. As it stands, their wealth brings the rich huge advantage, while the rest pay the price in increasing poverty, inequality, and planetary degradation.
At the same time, after an exceedingly difficult year of human suffering and economic pain, governments around the world are seeking yet again the holy grail of growth to keep the whole capitalist shebang on track and rolling. Often it is erroneously described in terms of delivering ‘green growth.’ This is a contradiction in terms, but invites us to believe that cosmetic changes will be enough to save us, and that we can continue pretty much as we are using new technologies; some of which are still in the land of imagination or have as yet to be proved.
We have reached a crossroads for decision making for the sort of society we want to see. As Jason Hickel, the author of ‘Less is more’ tweeted recently.
‘If your economy requires people to consume things they don’t need or even want, and to do more of it each year than the year before, just in order to keep the whole edifice from collapsing, then you need a different economy.’
Across the planet in both developed and developing countries, the prevailing economic system is built on the exploitation of humans and other real resources for profit at any cost and which is leading us down a path to no return.
And yet in the light of this, on the one hand we have the Conservative Chancellor promoting fiscal discipline and on the other, a Shadow Chancellor still grinding on about collecting tax from the rich to pay for public services, in a party beating its breast with mea culpa for there ‘not being any money left’ when it left office in 2010.
The continuing smoke and mirrors of public accounting will keep the lie going at huge cost. As climate change and the problem of the finite nature of real resources breathes down our collective neck, politicians are still asking the same old tired and irrelevant questions as to whether we can afford to save ourselves. All total baloney of course!
The G7 meeting has proved itself to be yet another talking shop and yet another of Boris Johnson’s ‘roadmaps’ to nowhere. The climate summit in November will undoubtedly take us even further down the greenwashing road to the maintenance of the status quo, given the current government’s ineffective, wishy-washy responses so far.
Worse, possible action is still viewed, at least in the UK, in terms of the state of the public finances and affordability. The government’s action on cutting foreign aid must put into question its commitment to bringing about change and addressing the vast global inequalities that exist largely as a result of neo-colonial domination and exploitation. We urgently need to acknowledge the vital role government can and must play in driving a real green agenda, not an apologist one serving the status quo.
The problem is this. What government that seeks re-election (unless you live in one of those countries which are suffering from the toxic consequences of capitalism and the neo-colonialism which continues to exploit and impoverish them, and who are unrepresented at the G7) is going to want either to deal with the hard truth or tell its populations that concrete transformational change to the way we live is needed. Not a change that aims to deprive people and make their lives miserable, but a revolution in the way we do things with the aim of changing our perspective, from one of endless consumption of stuff, to one of creating sustainable communities that put people and the planet at the heart of policymaking.
The sad truth is that governments currently exist for the benefit of global corporations, where profits matter more than people and the planet, and the rich are already looking for escape routes to safety – Mars might be a good choice. As the waters rise metaphorically and actually and nations start to fight over real resources, our children’s children will be the inheritors of the mess capitalism has made. Unless we do something different.
As Johnson spluttered on about the G7 rising to the challenge of ‘beating the pandemic and building back better, fairer and greener’, and bringing an end to ‘entrenched inequalities’ after Covid, it seemed he had totally forgotten, as had his colleagues, that those inequalities didn’t just happen by themselves. They happened as a result of decades of neoliberal ‘free market’ dogma, subscribed to by political parties of all shades, and which has been firmly rooted over the last 10 years in unnecessary austerity policies in many major economies and also imposed on indebted developing countries. And does he recognise the global inequalities that have been created by the same toxic ideology, whereby the resources of developing countries have been exploited at a terrible cost to support the living standards of the West, and upon which the green revolution is planned? This is the same man who has been happy to go along with cuts to foreign aid because apparently we have spent too much and must look to counting the pennies to get the public accounts in balance. The word hypocrite comes to mind. With such a scarcity narrative, it might seem an uphill struggle to address the challenges.
What happens next will be determined by political will and public support. It is rooted in the reality that the Blue Dot we inhabit is all we are, and all we have. Seen from that perspective, it should be an invitation to explore how we can do things differently. MMT offers a lens on how we can achieve that. The road might be bumpy, and we might make mistakes along the way, but in the end, we’ve nothing to lose.
Upcoming Event
Phil Armstrong In Conversation with Mike Hall
Sat, 3 July 2021 – 15:00 – 16:30 BST
GIMMS is delighted to present another in its series ‘In Conversation.’
GIMMS Associate Member Phil Armstrong will be talking to MMT activist Mike Hall.
Mike is a retired engineer and a liver of life of many parts including as an Industrial Controls Engineer, Windfarm Engineer, General Manager of IT refurb resale small business, Worker Co-op founder and local authority Co-op Development Worker. He studied for a Masters in Business Administration at Cranfield (UK) and has been an MMT activist for 11 years. He is also a grandfather and a lover of Jazz!
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