Mainstream or not, suddenly everyone’s an MMT-ist, even if they don’t cop to it openly. The novel coronavirus has laid the global economy low, and now there’s no limit to the money Washington can spend. Despite a structural budget deficit of roughly $1 trillion per year, Congress passed and President Trump signed a $2.2 trillion emergency spending package last month without blinking. In fact, Washington almost immediately launched bipartisan talks on the next 13-figure infusion of previously nonexistent money.

As Abraham Lincoln once said to his treasury secretary Salmon Chase when the urgency of events stripped the federal wallet: “Give your paper mill another turn.” Uncle Sam can’t run out of money as long as he controls the sole supply of dollars.

Orthodox economists, don’t yell at me. I’m just the messenger. MMT is crisis economics, and we’re in a crisis. A basic tenet of the theory, the ground from which it grows, is that the federal government can spend what needs to be spent to meet a challenge — World War II is the sharpest example. And the tremendous natural resources of the United States, human and material, are more than adequate to redeem whatever dollars are created in the process. We are, in that sense, richer than we dare to believe.

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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. 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 zero 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.

I spent a few hours last year at the UMKC economics department trying to understand MMT through the window of its mother ship. My first takeaway was that my rudimentary economics education is no match for a room full of PhDs. My second takeaway was that the supposedly pie-in-the-sky theorists were surprisingly eager to have their views tested against economic reality. Indeed, they made an enthusiastic case that they are more dedicated to reality than their orthodox peers.

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“They attack us for living in a Pollyanna world of unlimited resources,” offered William K. Black, an associate professor. The real question, though, should be: What resources are we talking about? The actual resources of the U.S. economy are not defined by the dollars printed or the taxes levied. The proof is in the pudding: How well is the economy functioning?

“You don’t look at the federal budget,” said Scott Fullwiler, another associate professor. “You look at the effect of spending and taxing in the real world.”

This is precisely what happens when a crisis overtakes the usual Washington back-and-forth. No one even nods toward balanced budgeting. Congress and the president spend whatever it takes. A pandemic is driving record numbers into unemployment and suffocating trillions of dollars of commerce? Flood the zone with dollars and grade the effort based on the ultimate performance of the imperiled economy. A hobbled private sector can’t create overnight trillions for an urgent infusion, so the money-printer in Washington does.

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MMT has roots in the 1971 decision to cut the tie between the dollar’s value and the gold supply. Overnight, money had a new meaning: whatever value the United States can set and defend. If the dollar isn’t losing value (inflation), then there must not be too many dollars in circulation. That’s simple supply and demand.

The theory gained strength from the crash of 2008 and the government’s massive response. Movements such as Occupy Wall Street asked why the federal spigot could be turned so easily to bail out banks but not to fund more progressive goals. That same question will surely persist with added vigor after the coronavirus crisis, around favorite projects of the left such as universal basic income and the Green New Deal.

Spending is the last bipartisan Washington activity. Our future politics will increasingly ask: on what?

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