The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton

 

The American left maintains the constant goal of articulating a better world. This means reshaping the American perspective of what is politically possible, think of the way Bernie Sanders popularized Medicare for All. Given that I've been able to win various people in my life over to the left (or at least to a position sympathetic to left values) with this method I've internalized the goal; I'm constantly on the lookout for policies and projects that can help reimagine the world we live in. 

Enter the Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton. Kelton's CV is, at its face, conventionally establishment; professor of economics, Chief Economist for the US Senate....Bloomberg contributor. Don't let this fool you, Kelton is here to buck convention and destroy public misconception. Using the lens of Modern Monetary Theory (or MMT), she sets out to dispel what is known as the deficit myth. 

The deficit myth is a pervasive view that the government deficit means that the government is so indebted that it is effectively out of money and couldn't possibly spend any more. You don't have to be a political scientist to understand the effects the deficit has on our political discourse. It's used to hand-wring about big, life-altering universal programs, it's used to scare voters into thinking society is on the brink of economic collapse if we don't get some fiscal sensibility, it's used to stage massive political battles on the Hill, some of which are so petty they shut the government down for weeks. Which is all to say the deficit myth is a useful idea to total assholes. 

Kelton's telling features 5 core misconceptions the deficit myth is generally used for, each has a chapter devoted to it; 

1. The US government budget operates like a finite household budget
2. We're putting young people on the hook for our national debt
3. government debt crowds out private investment 
4. The trade deficit means we owe countries like China 
5. Entitlement programs (Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security) are going broke

The main reason the deficit myth, all of the myths mentioned above, are bullshit is, that America prints its own money. It could essentially pay off any number of debts and pay for any number of programs. If it sounds impossible, you're likely thinking about the negative impacts of inflation, but as Kelton adeptly shows, that's a different argument entirely. We should be assessing our economy's ability to take an influx of cash in certain areas rather than if the money is there (because it always will be). 

The penultimate chapter "the Deficits that Matter" serves as Kelton's estimation that our economy can absolutely handle large sums of money as long as it's directed to where it counts with programs designed to help reduce the existing deficits that matter (like in education, healthcare, the environment). Whether the programs are "paid for" with tax revenue or whether they're produced via deficit spending doesn't matter so much as getting the money funneled into infrastructure, projects reducing the impacts of climate change, expanded healthcare etc 

The Deficit Myth helps us develop policy proposals that will improve our communities, it helps us imagine a better world where we don't handcuff ourselves with arbitrary fiscal constraints. In this regard, it is a very useful book. 

Butttttt.........I remain unconvinced by certain aspects of MMT. 

The role of taxes - Exploring the politically possible without worry about where the money comes from must be what it's like to oversee the Pentagon budget. Imagine if infrastructure or green energy or education funding bills soared through both houses of congress with the ease that our bloated war budgets do! What would you include in them? These are valuable exercises, but I can't help but feel without the conversation on taxation (MMT suggests that taxes do not in fact fund government spending), you're missing out on, frankly, some of the fun. 

To MMT, taxation is used to control inflation or to siphon money out of unuseful places (carbon emissions or offshore accounts). These are useful endeavors, but some of the value in the taxes as a payfor logic is that there is an inhent justice in making corporations and businesses (and even citizens) pay their fair share. I also don't feel like we can abandon taxation as a payfor because - as Kelton herself points out - state and local governments use tax revenues. The continuance of using payfor verbiage isn't to continue to suggest money is finite but rather that it is a public good used to pay for services that we all benefit in. 

Doug Henwood has a large piece criticizing MMT, I don't agree with much of it (I think MMT is helping), but I do agree with his position on taxation: 

"We have homeless people living on the streets of San Francisco blocks from Twitter and Uber’s headquarters, bridges collapsing, trains derailing, schools falling to bits — the entire structure of private opulence and public squalor, as John Kenneth Galbraith put it long ago, because the public sector is starved for resources. Taxing takes those resources out of private hands and puts them into public ones, with at least the potential for them to be spent on more humane pursuits. Fewer Lamborghinis, more bullet trains. Fewer Hamptons houses, more public housing."

Messaging - Along those same lines taxation is still an important part of the puzzle for how we create a people's economy (the subtitle of the Deficit Myth). Kelton acknowledges that the government needs to tax to control inflation, redistribute wealth, and discourage bad behavior. Except only the first of those seems entirely necessary. No one is suggesting we can just print money consequence free. Yet the idea that we're printing money, doling it out, and then taxing some of it back to incinerate it doesn't have the same messaging power as "the money is used to pay for services" (which again,  is still true, since it does in fact pay for local government services). 

It's way easier to talk to people about social security and medicare, two successful government programs who have so far mostly withstood efforts to abolish and privatize, when you suggest that they are in fact paying into it. They are! Whether you believe the money is going to partially fund the program or - as MMT suggests - is being removed from the economy, the truth is you're paying for it. The accounting trick of payfor is just easier to explain to people. Matt Bruenig (who is actually quoted positively in the book) gets at the heart of MMT's messaging problems: 

"This is a good way to jam up the discourse and confuse people, which can arguably be useful politically, but as a policy matter, it does not add any new insight. It tells you that the correct question is not “how will you pay for this” but rather “how will you offset the inflation that is caused by paying for this with created money since all government spending is created money.” Nonetheless the rephrased question has the same answer as the first one: some combination of taxes and borrowing that will eventually have to be worked out."

Jobs program - I despise the idea of a jobs program and think it is one of the most undertheorized projects to come out of the left. The MMT Job Garuntee (JG) answers one of the striking questions of modern poverty; what do we do with the under/unemployed? MMT: "give them a job". Oh your oil rig laid you off because we're not extracting oil anymore? Here's a job. You're a truck driver and your profession was automated? Here's a job. You get a job, you get a job, you get a job! 

The idea is that, somehow, the government can be flexible enough to provide jobs to areas suffering joblessness. There are tons of problems with this idea; no one can articulate what jobs would be ephemeral and useful enough, how long could the jobs theoretically be kept up, some areas have lots of jobs and just not enough qualified people to work them, jobs are hard and require training, etc etc. Which isn't to say I don't agree with a jobs program, similar to, say, the New Deal, that offers jobs to people who can do them especially in times of high private sector unemployment, but a constant jobs guarantee seems impossible and undesirable. 

One of the best arguments against it is the population of our unemployed are...not people who would or should be working at all. The better move is to give these people money. This is another from Bruenig's outfit, but the argument seems airtight:

All in all, MMT is useful in its efforts to destroy the traditional deficit myths that plague our ability to use our policy imaginations. If worked out, I think it could provide some pretty compelling answers to the incalcuably stupid, misguided, and bad faith question "hOw ArE yOu GonnA PaY fOr ThAt". But it still has some limits of its own and might complicate certain aspects of the debate that are better left simplified. I'm glad I can keep it in my back pocket, but will avoid keeping it in my front pocket for now. 

Nemesis by Philip Roth

 

"Don't be against yourself. There is enough cruelty in the world as it is."

Set in 1944 Newark, New Jersey in the height of the polio epidemic, Nemesis by Philip Roth could not be more of a timely read. All the paranoia, frustration, and pain currently shrouding our COVID pandemic is present at its heart, but so is the sense of injustice. 

The story focuses on the tragic hero Bucky Cantor; a fresh college graduate who - being too clinically blind to be drafted into WWII - takes a position as a teacher and summer playground superintendent in the city. Impossible to overstate how likable Roth writes his protagonist Bucky. From the onset, you love Bucky almost as much as his students do. His sense of duty lacks all the annoyingness the trait usually relays, Roth is a master at painting the picture of a young man who genuinely cares about the people around him. 

This of course makes it all the more devastating as the worst things imaginable begin to descend on those people. Polio strikes the playground hard, killing children Bucky feels personally responsible for. We watch the strong, dutiful, and likable Bucky begin to rage against the virus, the war, a God who would let it all happen, and ultimately himself. 

The reader spends quite a bit of time in this space with Mr. Cantor, existing inside his head as he tortures himself. Roth casts a striking duality; we're treated to scenes of sickening grief as Bucky witnesses the families of Polio's child victims contend with such a lost, then, while Bucky remains externally composed and rational, we're given torturous internal monologues castigating any universal authority for the irrational unfairness of it all. 

All of which makes Nemesis a concise and beautiful piece of work. Reading it in the wake of our own brutal pandemic isn't comforting - that wouldn't be the right word - but it does offer a sense of interconnectedness with an America from another time; plagued by a deadly virus, prejudice, war, and senseless, irrational death. Nemesis is a tough reminder that we might actually suffer alone, but also that we can take solace in the fact that we always have.  

[Read Richard Brody's breakdown of the similarities between Nemesis and our current moment.]

Marxism A Graphic Guide by Rupert Woodfin

I was at Powell's Books in Portland, specifically in their politics section, when it hit me: looking for new books to read always makes me have to shit. This happens without fail. I didn't have time to go and resume my search after so the last book I grabbed was one with the most alluring cover: Marxism A Graphic Guide.

I'm not a huge theory guy. I feel like I actually spent a lot of time organizing with the DSA getting dunked on by people who can quote Das Kapital like the bible. I thought a graphic guide would be a good way for a time-pressed idiot like myself to learn some of the basics and defend myself from the rabid mobs of anarchists insisting that Medicare for All is fascism. 

And maybe it is, but certainly not this graphic guide. It became clear by page 74 that Woodfin is actually not a fan of Marx. The first 70 or so pages are an introduction to Marx's life and theory of value. Woodfin then pivots, saying "Marxist Theory seemed rigorous....but more or less all economists today believe Marx's theory seriously flawed, or, to put it bluntly, wrong". He then spends the next 100 pages giving massive amounts of air time to Marx's anarchist and capitalist detractors - Bakunin and Francis Fukuyama play big roles - and post Marxists like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Significant time is spent talking about the authoritarianism of Russia, because of course. 

The last page of the guide has a 10-point criticism of Marxism that includes such gems as "in an interdependent, globalized world, anti-imperialism has had its day. The world is too complex", "the state as such is always dangerous and cannot deliver effective social welfare", "any form of central planning is inefficient and tends toward corruption". It's unclear if Woodfin, who taught Marxism to undergrads (his bio doesn't list where) actually believes these criticisms, but it's strange that they're included and seem to refute a theory he spends almost no time defending. 

[Martin Hagglund on Socialism]

It strikes me that Woodfin holds with neo-classical and modern economists he cites who, as the brilliant Martin Hagglund puts it, "seek to explain the value of commodities not in terms of labor time but in terms of supply and demand". Even though supply and demand seem like immutable orthodoxy, the concept doesn't reject Marx like some would think, Hagglund goes on: "the model of supply and demand confirms [Marx] argument that socially necessary labor time is the measure of value for commodities. [These concepts] cannot be understood merely in spatial terms but must be understood in temporal terms". The example I found very compelling was if water was even a fraction as difficult to obtain as diamonds, the value of water would be insane regardless of supply.  

So to be clear, Marxism a Graphic Guide is a critical guide, paying tribute to Marxism only in its influence as a critical theory of the past. The stance of the author is that we have moved beyond the need for such a theory. And also that the government is inherently evil? Anyway, the cover is still pretty damn cool and I have to give it to illustrator Oscar Zarate, the art is fun: 

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

Written in devastatingly beautiful prose, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things starts with an immense tragedy - the drowning of a young English girl - and unravels everything before and after, traversing time and generations to do so. 

It is an intensely visual novel. It wouldn't be inaccurate to say the ultimate god of small things is Roy herself. Her descriptive form follows the narrative of the novel. If she wants to describe a room or an event, she starts by focusing in on the poetry of the smallest adjacent objects and expands out. While much of the praise The God of Small Things received, including that printed on the book, compare her to Faulkner, but I tend to think this style more original.

The words "white supremacy" or "Eurocentrism" never appear in The God of Small Things, but they play a central role in the destruction. Roy rather than baking the love of everything white and European into her characterization directly, she takes the more subtle and difficult route of integrating these concepts into the objects that make up the novel's setting, the character's clothes, the way other people interact with them, etc. 

There are tons of examples as to how fun and original this prose style can be. Anyone with Fox News loving, paranoid grandparents can relate to this passage:

"She was frightened by the BBC famines and television wars that she encountered while she channel surfed. Her old fears of the revolution and the Marxist-Leninist menace had been rekindled by new television worries about the growing numbers of desperate and dispossessed people. She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture.

She kept her doors and windows locked, unless she was using them. She used her windows for specific purposes. For a Breath of Fresh Air. To Pay for the Milk. To Let Out a Trapped Wasp"

Everything from the sentence casing on the uses for windows to the "direct threat to furniture" makes an enjoyable read. 

 I think one of my favorite things about Roy, on in full display writing this book, is how well she writes children. All the nuanced adorableness in their dialogue, things like "feeling vomity" or "afternoonmare", and in their view of the world. The novel focuses mostly on Rahel and Eshta; young precocious twins whose inner thoughts, expressed exactly how you would expect a child's thoughts to be, pepper the story and whose simplicity adds anything from humor to debilitating grief to any given moment. 

Of course the beauty of the style is on full display too. Without spoilers, my favorite line in the book pertains to the way the caste system destroyed the possibility of working-class solidarity in the Indian Communist movement (as demonstrated by the event central to the novel): "And there it was again. Another religion turned against itself. Another edifice constructed by the human mind, decimated by human nature". 

Absolutely stunning. 

An Amateur Athlete's Review of Training for the Uphill Athlete

Ok, honestly? I bought Training for the Uphill Athlete because of the pictures. I'm not kidding. I was in Munising this past Feb (seems like 20 years ago, a different time) for the Michigan Ice Climbing Festival and while at a coffee/book shop it caught my eye. Outdoor sports are really good at getting you in the mood to spend money on things you don't necessarily need.

Except it turns out I really did need this book. Which is strange to say because I'm not a mountain runner or skier. I'm an amateur mountain biker and rock climber, I don't race and or compete so there isn't much reason to train for doing so, and I probably never will.

But that doesn't matter because what makes Training for the Uphill Athlete so great is how well it translates things that happen to an active body into easily understandable concepts.

For example, I used to "bonk" like crazy. This would effectively ruin my entire day; I'd have massive headaches and exhaustion after an activity and I ultimately couldn't keep up with my friends if the activity was a little longer. This made long bike rides or hikes to the crag frustrating rather than fun (another reason you want to train; being better at activities and more prepared physically does actually make them more fun).

Turns out, there is a way to train off what is called "Aerobic Deficiency Syndrom" (ADS). My metabolism needed training to burn more fats than sugars, which you can do by engaging in long, low intensity, slow workouts. It was a total game-changer, plus I ended up losing a healthy amount of weight. Did you know you can train your metabolism with exercise? I sure as shit did not.

The "Training" in Training for the Uphill Athlete actually means training your body for your fitness needs, not necessarily for any particular race or event. It throws any sort of fad fitness theories out the window in favor of a comically simple technique; identifying what your body needs (like metabolic training, muscular endurance, recovery, intensity) and training for it. You can do this regardless of being a competitive athlete, but the results amazed me.

The results from my favorite local MTB trail. You can see how even at previous season peaks I was nowhere near my current midseason level. I started really reading this book in May!

The book is also peppered with stories from world-class athletes; their trials, their frustrations, their success etc. It breaks up the textbook feel and really gets you in the right mood. Whomst among us isn't inspired by mountain athletes.

I highly recommend Training for the Uphill Athlete to anyone engaged in or even interested in an active lifestyle. It's accessible, fun, and incredibly useful.

Oh, and the pictures are cool, come on:

The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

If you want to know what the Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein is all about, look at what she tells Gail Kastner, a living survivor of one of the CIA's torture programs from the 50s;

"I'm writing a bookabout shock. About how countries are shocked - by wars, terror attacks, coups, and natural disasters. And then how they are shocked again - by corporations and politicians who exploit the fear and disorientation of the first shock to push through econoic shock therapy. And then how people who dare to resist these shock politics are, if necessary, shocked foa third time - by police, soldiers and prioson interrogators."

Or, if you want to know what the Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein is all about, look the fuck around. We've been shocked by the COVID-19 pandemic, by the government and corporations who have taken the opportunity to expand their wealth and roll back regulations while only tossing crumbs to the rest of us, and now we're being shocked by police brutality all across the country as we rally in solidarity against the austerity and racial violence that's ravaged our communities well before COVID.

 It is almost impossible to express how profoundly important Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine is. It ties the machinations of capital and imperialism with a tidy bow called the shock doctrine, an idea cooked up by Chicago School economists (generally known for their Libertarianism). Klein delves into the world's largest corporations and their owner's efforts, internationally united under banners like the World Bank and the IMF (or just hiding behind powerful governments), to force countries all over the world and throughout time to seize resources, commodities, cheap labor, and more. They just have to get around pesky things like democracy and popular support for things like social programs.

To do this, the slate must be cleared. People need to be forced into desperate situations, thrown into disorganization, and given little choice over what is to come. Sometimes, this happens after a massive disaster or things beyond the control of the powerful. Sometimes capital will push these situations with tricks like development loans that have austerity and privatization clauses baked in. Othertimes capital will grow impatient and design coups or wars to force it.

Once the citizens are effectively tricked or brutalized into accepting that they aren't in power, massive amounts of wealth transfers ensue. Land, resources, state-owned assets, and even people are forcefully taken or given outright by the corrupted or swindled governments that once held them in the name of the common good. Once, if ever, citizens rise up to speak out and organize against this plunder, the response is torture, the militarized (sometimes privatized) law enforcers, black bags, and bombs.

Klein is there to document all of it (sometimes even physically there as she does quite a bit of on the ground reporting in places like Post-Katrina Louisiana or Post-911 Iraq). "The Shock Doctrine", "the Washington Consensus", "Neoliberalism", whatever you want to call it has been continuously deployed in South America, the South Asia Sea, China, Africa, Russia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and even right here in the US. It disproportionally affects BIPOC and the poorest people of the world. It's been deployed by companies like Ford, Chevron, Apple, Boeing, US Steel, Haliburton and more. It won't matter how many flashy, social justice jargon-laden PR statements corporations put out in their new efforts to market shit we don't need, once you read The Shock Doctrine you'll never forget these companies are not on your side.

In fact, there is no going back after reading The Shock Doctrine at all. You'll see it everywhere you look, at scales large and small. Reading Klein's books was probably the biggest shock of all. Learning that capital is organized and living and active in its efforts to direct more of everything in the world that holds value, from tangibles like the rainforest to things as precious as our free time, directly to those that own it, is terrifying. The only question you'll have after reading about it is what you can do to stop it.

 

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson has been on my radar for a while but after hearing his interview on Chapo Traphouse I ran right out and bought it. The way KSR talks about the imperative of a post-scarcity future seemed like it would translate well into science fiction (which I am woefully unfamiliar with). And it really did!

It was a lucky break reading 2312 right after reading Martin Hagglund's This Life, which is all about how the ephemeral nature of life is exactly what gives it meaning. 2312, meanwhile, features a whole cast of characters who frankly don't seem to give a rip about life even while they torture themselves searching for its meaning.

The year is...well, you guessed it... the earth is in dysfunctional, post-climate change ruin (though people still live there) and space is colonized. The contrasts between earth and space are telling; Earth is miserable, bureaucratic, and life there is brutal and short while space seems to be filled with drifting artist types who spend their time building little terrariums on astroids for...artistic expression? Space is post-scarcity, Earth still has war for resources. Space is full of life, Earth isn't.

Two elements make this book for me; first, is the world-building. Robinson introduces his readers to his imagined future in excerpts that read like exercises in trying to put creative flair on technical writing. In style, it makes me think about the chapters in Moby Dick like "Of the Monsterous Pictures of Whales", "Cetology", or "Chowder"; exploratory sections that allow the reader to discover the world through fact and object, rather than through the lens of a character or a plot point (think of the way Rowling builds the wizarding world through Harry's lone interaction with it). This features some of the most breathtaking writing in the book. Heavy description laced with poetry, like Walt Whitman writing your biology textbook.

The second thing was the journey that characters like Swan and Waharm embark on. Not as far as the physical locations they go, but watching these three "spacers" develop an appreciation for life is endearing as hell. In space, your life span is longer, almost infinite, your options are limitless, and it seems hard to die (though not impossible). Even in the aftermath of near-death experiences, the spacers struggle to appreciate the value it should impart on their life: "Our stories go on awhile, some genes and words persist; then we go away. It was a hard thing to remember. And as the lock door closed and they were back inside, [Swan] once again forgot it". So when (**mild spoiler alert here**) in a beautifully written scene, Swan and Waharm repopulate the earth with all its long-extinct animal life because a shared life is a beautiful entity, I was literally tearing up.

So as the Trump administration continues to roll back environmental regulations and entire continents burn, I enjoy reading about a future where life is finally given the value it deserves.

From ComicCrit:http://comiccrits.com/2012/08/2312-by-kim-stanley-robinson/