; Whereas, on February 26, 2019, Jerome Powell, Chair of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, stated: The idea that deficits don’t matter for countries that can borrow in their own currency I think is just wrong. ; Whereas, on February 24, 2019, Matt Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project, wrote in an article entitled What’s the Point of Modern Monetary Theory that the real point of MMT seems to be to deploy misleading rhetoric with the goal of deceiving people about the necessity of taxes in a social democratic system. If successful, these word games might loosen up fiscal and monetary policy a bit in the short term. But insofar as getting government spending permanently up to 50 percent of GDP really will require substantially more taxes in the medium and long term. ; Whereas, on February 21, 2019, Doug Henwood, a journalist and economic analyst, wrote in an article in Jacobin entitled Modern Monetary Theory Isn’t Helping that MMT’s lack of interest in the relationship between money and the real economy causes adherents to overlook the connection between taxing, spending, and the allocation of resources ; Whereas, on January 28, 2019, in a question and answer session with James Pethokoukis of AEIdeas, Stan Veuger, visiting lecturer of economics at Harvard University, stated that, if you take MMTers at their word in the most aggressive sense, then what you would see is a massive debt finance expansion of the welfare state with Medicare for All, with a jobs guarantee, and with concerns about inflation being deferred entirely to elected officials who would have to raise taxes to keep it under control. I think in a scenario like that, we do run a risk of going back to the 1970s pre-Volker style macroeconomics and I think that would be bad.