(Back then, we bet on unprecedented inflation, and that’s been working out great so far.)

> we tax hardworking Americans mightily to finance global security. On the financial side, the reserve function of the dollar has caused persistent currency distortions and contributed, along with other countries’ unfair barriers to trade, to unsustainable trade deficits.

Money is fungible between these two concerns. The excess demand for USD is a source of revenue for our economic empire, realized by the continual monetary inflation without nearly as much corresponding price inflation. Some of that monetary inflation has been used by the government (~"deficit spending"), but the sheer majority has been getting dumped into the financial industry to bid up existing assets as a handout to the rich. That is what has left the American worker high and dry - near complete inability for the US government to use that already-centralized revenue to help wider society, due to a political movement based around fake austerity.

The article continues on using the passive voice to describe multiple things that the US government could have put a stop to any time it wanted, framed as if they were being done to us by other countries. For example:

> in the years running up to the 2008 crash, China along with many foreign financial institutions, increased their holdings of U.S. mortgage debt, which helped fuel the housing bubble, forcing hundreds of billions of dollars of credit into the housing sector without regard as to whether the investments made sense

Obviously if the government had set interest rates higher rather than lower, there would have been fewer mortgage bonds to buy and the dollars would have had to go elsewhere. I don't know if this pattern is deliberate or just an inevitable result of the bizzarro framing where having the world reserve currency is asserted to be a liability, but either way it is most certainly not honest.

What he is effectively saying is that large swaths of the American populace need to accept lower economic strength in order to decouple our reliance on our trading partners. And his reason for doing so is so that we can wage war on them. It's a completely nonsensical approach to maintain American hegemony. Why would any prefer strength through violence rather than maintaining the current system of American hegemony through trade?

While reserve currency status has it's warts, especially like he points out, the absolute immense amount of demand for US debt which fuels an uncontrolled spending crisis domestically I believe that is 1000% preferable to my daughters working in factories, and my sons dying in the Taiwan strait? For what? So that maybe the US can forcibly bomb China back into a nation of poor farmers and claim ideological victory over the communist project? It's completely inane.

You need to go one step further and ask yourself why he's proposing this. Instead of reexamining our relationship with China and asking ourselves how can we win in a multi-polar future, Miran and Trump have taken the view that China must remain a global adversary and we must maintain some sort of leverage on them.

It relies on discipline in the government to prevent inflation, e.g. raising taxes and cutting spending. But this is a similar problem to what we have already. There is no discipline, just short term thinking due to bad incentives.

http://www.thomaspalley.com/docs/articles/macro_theory/mmt_r...

Early indications suggest he has already ruined it with tariffs, erratic jailing of skilled laborers and gutting of the government programs and agencies that were supporting the investment in the first place. The dollar has dropped 10% since inauguration day, inflation is way up and the deficit is ballooning.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/C307RC1Q027SBEA

https://www.exchange-rates.org/converter/usd-eur

SS/Medicare will bankrupt the country without reforms.

When have any of these presidents successfully pushed for reducing the federal deficit during their tenures? Any actual reductions to the debt you’ve seen?

What’s causing you to focus on presidents rather than congressional actions?

How do you think fiscal policy keeps getting passed through congress when there’s largely two parties that have to agree to get it done?

Then came 1994, and the "Contract With America". Republicans took over Congress. Their next budget made significant cuts then, not after Clinton was out of office. That's how "Clinton balanced the budget" - by a Republican Congress forcing him to live up to his words.

Lest you think this is a partisan statement, let me note that Republican Congresses never balance the budget when a Republican is President. But the historical record is that it wasn't just Clinton's achievement - a Republican Congress had to make him do what he wanted to make the next president do.