by Yeva Nersisyan and L. Randall Wray

As MMT has been thrust into the spotlight, misrepresentations and misunderstanding have followed. MMT supposedly calls for cranking up the printing press, engaging in helicopter drops of cash or having the Fed finance government spending by engaging in Quantitative Easing.

None of this is MMT.

Instead, MMT provides an analysis of fiscal and monetary policy applicable to national governments with sovereign, non-convertible currencies. It concludes that the sovereign currency issuer: i) does not face a “budget constraint” (as conventionally defined); ii) cannot “run out of money”; iii) meets its obligations by paying in its own currency; iv) can set the interest rate on any obligations it issues.

Current procedures adopted by the Treasury, the central bank, and private banks allow government to spend up to the budget approved by Congress and signed by the President. No change of procedures, no money printing, no helicopter drops are required. continue reading…

Luiza Nassif-Pires, Laura de Lima Xavier, Thomas Masterson, Michalis Nikiforos, and Fernando Rios-Avila

Disproving the belief that the pandemic affects us all equally, data collected by New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and a piece published today in the New York Times shows that the novel coronavirus is “hitting low-income neighborhoods the hardest.”[1] In a forthcoming policy brief, we share evidence that this pattern would be the case and provide a solid explanation as to why (Nassif-Pires et al., forthcoming). Moreover, as we argue, the death tolls are also likely to be higher among poor neighborhoods and majority-minority communities. This inequality in health costs is in addition to an unequal distribution of economic costs. In short, poor and minority individuals are disproportionately feeling the impacts of this crisis. A concise version of our evidence is presented here.

The toll of social inequality in healthcare is well known. A clear relationship has been repeatedly demonstrated between social determinants — such as income, education, occupation, social class, sex, and race/ethnicity — and the incidence and severity of many diseases. This association holds true for infectious respiratory illnesses such as influenza, SARS and also for COVID-19, as figure 1 shows. The consequences of this imbalance are particularly catastrophic when there is a massive disease outbreak. The precise mechanisms by which social determinants drive unequal disease burden during these outbreaks is harder to assess. On the one hand, there is a strong association of social determinants with clinical risk factors for respiratory illnesses such as chronic diseases, on the other, social aspects of poverty increase the risks of individuals contracting infectious diseases.

To establish the relationship between poverty and the clinical risk of a severe case of COVID-19, we estimate a health risk index as a function of poverty and percentage of minority population in neighborhoods of 500 cities. We use data from the 500 Cities project and from the American Community Survey. The risk index accounts for the incidence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, coronary disease, cancer,  asthma,  kidney disease, high blood pressure, percentage of smokers, proportion of individuals with poor physical health and the proportion of the population that is above 65 years old. All data is available at the census tract level and results are presented in figure 1 and figure 2^[2]. continue reading…