Debunking the Deficit Hysteria with Stephanie Kelton

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

MS NOW, Chris Hayes

News, Versant Media, Versant, Ms Now, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2019

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Should you be worried about the federal deficit? While campaigning, President Trump followed in the footsteps of his conservative predecessors by fear-mongering about the ballooning deficit but when he got to the White House that concern seemed to disappear when it came to his tax cuts for the rich and increased government spending. In fact, there’s a pattern to the Republicans’ selective concern about increasing the deficit, and it all depends on who holds the power. When you look at the behavior of people in politics, they don’t really care about the national debt as much as they like to talk about it. So what does their bad faith use of the deficit tell us about how important that number actually is? Stephanie Kelton is here to break it all down - the national deficit, the nature of money itself, federal spending, and why it’s time to stop comparing it to a household budget. Email us at [email protected] Tweet using #WITHpod Read more at nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening

Transcript

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0:00.0	Let's say we pass a green new deal and we don't raise taxes at all. We don't like undo the
0:06.9	Trump tax cuts, nothing, nothing changes in the tax rate, but we spend a trillion dollars more
0:11.4	a year. That's enormous, right? A trillion dollar green new deal a year would be
0:16.6	World War II mobilization level increase. Your point is as long as there's slack in the real
0:23.2	capacity that there's productive investment to do with that, there will not be negative consequences
0:28.9	that is that is your fundamental content. There will not be negative inflationary consequences.
0:37.2	Hello and welcome to Why is this happening with me? Your host Chris Hayes.
0:41.2	I'm about to uncork a rant that is a real go-to rant for me. You may have heard
0:45.6	another various platforms that I occupy. It's and it concerns the thing in politics that
0:51.5	drives me the craziest. It's not like the most, it's not the worst thing that happened in politics,
0:56.0	but it's the thing that just drives me the craziest and it has to do with the way that people
1:00.4	talk about deficits. And I am driven absolutely to madness by this. I have watched my entire adult
1:07.7	life in politics. People talk about the deficit as this terrifying thing, the deficits too high,
1:13.3	the debts too high, and because of that we cannot do X. And what that always means isn't really
1:19.2	I care about the deficit or the debt. It never means that. It's a lie. It's always a lie. In fact,
1:24.4	it's a lie that's so reliable that it's essentially a kind of linguistic substitution.
1:28.6	It's just an invocation of an outside authority to say like, I don't like what you're proposing.
1:33.2	So whenever someone, you know, whatever Republican politician you want to choose, Paul Ryan,
1:37.3	who was concerned about deficits and debts, Paul Ryan doesn't care about deficits and debts.
1:41.6	And you only need to know that but look at his voting record. Like he voted for the Iraq war,
1:45.1	he voted for all the defense appropriations, and he voted for Medicare Part D, which was a drug
1:49.2	prescription benefit pushed through by the Bush administration, unfunded. They just created
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