Great piece from @DavidVonDrehle

"Forced social distancing should give even the busiest academic economists some time to bone up on MMT. It’s not quite the cartoon money machine it has been made out to be. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/so-long-balanced-budgets-everyones-into-endless-spending-now/2020/04/07/1e2d49f2-78f5-11ea-9bee-c5bf9d2e3288_story.html

Proponents agree with the orthodoxy, for example, that there can be such a thing as too much spending. And they agree that excessive spending reveals itself in rising inflation, which (they agree) is an economic danger that the government must resist.

But the MMT-ists have noticed that a dozen years of massive federal deficit spending, going back to the Great Recession, have produced only meager inflation.

Quite the contrary: With central banks around the world asking close to 0 interest rates on virtually unlimited supplies of capital, more macroeconomists are worried about deflation than inflation. Someone’s models are broken, it would appear. Just not MMT’s."