Call Me Modern Monetary Theory with Steve Grumbine

Dai and David kick off season five with an extra special guest!  Steve Grumbine is a Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) Evangelist and serves as the CEO & President of Real Progressives and Real Progress in Action.  Steve also hosts Macro N Cheese, a podcast that critically examines the working class struggle through the lens of MMT.  Dai, David, and Steve discuss MMT, the role of taxation, the Democratic Party, inflation and deflation, retirement funding, universal basic services, war bonds, and much much more.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:26

Hello and welcome back to another episode of your favorite podcast. It's your boy Day. And I'm David, and together we are creating conversations. This is Call Me Limbo. We are so, so, so excited to kick off season five with a very special guest that aligns with Day's educating and empowering theme. So I'm gonna let him introduce our guests.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Yes, I am super excited. This man has been in super influential when it comes to my radicalization when it comes to economic policies on the federal level and how we, as progressives, need to be changing our messaging and the way that we approach these conversations because the propaganda is real from the right and from the neoliberal order. So he is the founder of one of my favorites, The Real Progressives, where they focus on advocacy, education, and outreach to support progressive policies, candidates, and economics for all citizens. It is, he is also host of an incredible podcast, Macro and Cheese. So please make sure you check that out after listening to this episode. Um, the one and the only, Steve Grumbine. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much, gentlemen. That was very, very great intro. I appreciate it. Well, thank you. Yes, so I wanted to kick things off. Um, you consider yourself, and I love this title, a modern monetary theory evangelist. So before we break down exactly what that is and all that entails, I am very curious as to how did you come to MNT and how did it, when did you become radicalized and know that this is the thing for me? And you kind of took off with it.

SPEAKER_02 2:09

Well, um, so 2008, I got my master's degree, and during that time I learned a lot about economics and uh been through an awful lot. My story is well known, I've told it a million times, but I'm a former Republican. Went through, did a drive-by through libertarianism, uh, came over to the Democratic Party for a short wave, uh, still registered as a Democrat, even though I moved beyond them to the left, voted green the last couple elections. Um, I am what I consider to be an MMT informed socialist, leftist, whatever you want to call it. Progressive is a title that we started this organization I run 10 years ago. And I would say progressive is no longer a really good moniker for what we are, but it's hard to change name and we built a brand, so we stick with it. Um, but I would say that, you know, I um was in a jail cell in 2002 with about five or six young black men. And at the time I had two ounces of pot in my car that I got arrested for drunk driving and possession. And when I went into the jail cell, there were these young brothers, and they had maybe a couple joints or something like that. And uh they sent me the commissioner. Commissioner said they were gonna release me on my own recognizance in the morning once you know I got sober and get a ride home. And they said I was a meaningful member of society, I had a good job, I was a family member, blah, blah, blah. Went to church. So they said, You're not a flight risk, you know, you're gonna go. Went I went back into the jail cell waiting, and they were all like, hey man, what's going on? What you know, what's happening with you? And I said, they're gonna release me in the morning. They're like, damn man, we're gonna be in here for two weeks. I said, What? I said, What did you guys do? He said, We had a joint, man, just a joint. They caught us smoking, they were blah, blah, blah. And it was in that moment that my Republican eyes were really, really open to something. Because I it it I didn't like have this major epiphany at that point, but I had enough of an epiphany that something wasn't right. And I it started my train rolling. Okay. When I finished my MBA, I still knew something wasn't right. You know, it was right, I finished it right around the time of the Great Recession, and I lost a 17-year career at Verizon. I was laid off, it was one of 10,000 people laid off at the one time. And so I started this quest to figure out what the hell was going on, and a bunch of people in these different uh discussion groups on Facebook back when it was, you know, very, very vibrant, kept asking me if I knew what a dollar was, if I had any idea of where dollars came from. And and so it started my MMT journey. These people really brought me through before MMT was really a thing. People didn't, I mean it's been a thing forever, but the the understanding of it, I was only known by a very, very, very small minority of people. And I got in, wouldn't say at the ground floor, but I was like on the first floor. And um, so I just kept learning and learning and realizing that all the conversations that Democrats and Republicans were pitching back and forth, both of them were lying or wrong. Okay. I I think the powers that be knew they were lying, but I think the people that were saying were just dupes that didn't know any better. Democrats, I'd pay more for health care, blah, blah, blah. And Republicans are saying, don't waste my hard-earned tax dollars. And then Democrats saying, I don't want my hard-earned tax dollars being spent on blah, blah, blah, insert whatever icky thing you don't like and so forth. And it just, once I understood the role of taxation, which is to maintain the strength and power of the dollar, not to fund program, it's like going to Sabaros at a mall and they hand you a 50 cent coupon and you walk up there and you're like, Well, I want to keep this 50 cent coupon. They're like, I don't care. I mean, you know, I just usually go a trash draw I care, right? The United States government prints coupons too. They're they're one dollar bills, their coins, they're whatever, the unit of account for the nation. And so I was like, Well, wait a minute, hold on. If the nation creates its own unit of account, how could it be in debt borrowing its own money? That doesn't make sense. And then I started asking, well, wait a minute, hold on. If it spends money into existence because it's the creator of the dollar, then what did taxes really do? And MMT had answers for all of those things, right? And suddenly the world became very different. And I was blessed and cursed with this horrible knowledge of how the system is, listening to every Tom Dick, and Harry go out there and say, my hard-earned tax dollars, I don't want, you know. So flash forward to the Bernie Sanders movement, and uh, you know, uh Stephanie Kelton was Bernie Sanders economic advisor. She had been the Senate, uh, the minority. Uh, I think it was not, was it Senate or the House? Anyway, she was I think she I think it was the Senate, but she was um she was the minority chief economist for the um for the Democrats, and so you know, there was this MMT team in the background yelling, yay, Stephanie's over there, and so like, yay, let's follow her. And then, you know, I didn't know who Bernie Sanders was. I I mean everybody else knew who Bernie was. I didn't know who Bernie was. I never heard of Bernie Sanders. I didn't care about I knew the weird guy with the weird hair that looked like George Washington minus the ponytail, and you know, but I didn't have any background on this stuff, but I knew she did, and I knew MMT was where I was headed, so I said, Well, let me jump on the Bernie train. Anyway, we taste tested that whole, you know, it was like impossible to say I'm not voting for Clinton at that time. Everybody was like, What do you mean? She's the most qualified, this, that, and the other. And enter Bernie Sanders, and it all fundamentally changed. And I said for the first time, never Hillary. Uh you know, and and so we just started processing and little by little watching them tear down everything we cared about, and it all just became very, how do I put it? It became greater than theater. It became a mission to destroy these neoliberals, these these parasites that supported Wall Street. And you know, all this time I've been told the Democrats supported the working class, and I'm sitting there going, no, they don't. What are you talking about? And so I because I had not been indoctrinated in vote blue sycophancy at that point, I I was e able to resist it. It was like bouncing off me. None of that, you know, cry bullying worked on me. And uh, but then when I saw what they did to Bernie Sanders in that that I think that fully radicalized me. That was what pushed me over the edge to say uh dem exit. Okay. Now, when Bernie decided to run again, I was still holding on to some rage at him for selling us out. We were willing to go to the map, we would have died for the cause. And you know, he was like, My good friend Hillary Clinton. That destroyed me. When I heard him say that, I wanted to throw up because I had spent the last year beating the heck out of her for all the horrible things she said about us and him. Flash forward to 2024. You know, I was like, I'm not gonna get sucked in again, but I did. I got sucked in again. I campaigned for Bernie, I got involved with the Green New Deal, all these things that MMT enables that brings it makes it possible to do even, right? But then Bernie was railroaded by the entire Democratic establishment. I think they ran like 19 candidates, I don't know how many it was, it was a lot. And none of them had a prayer of winning, but all of them were there to just simply diffuse the vote. And then when Obama did what Obama does with James Clyburn and Bill Clinton, and they basically sideline the entire movement one more time. I was officially done because once he said, My good friend Joe Biden will be the greatest, most progressive president since FDR, once he did that, Bernie was persona non grata with me. I had nothing, I didn't want to hear a word he had to say that point forward. So Bernie is as left as you get in the party. AOC's busy spinning and selling lies. She had gone from standing on Pelosi's desk to literally calling her mom a bear in 0.2 seconds, threw her out the window. The only one that had any prayer was Rashida Talib, who, you know, had taken folks like Ron Gray, who uh many of your uh listeners may not have heard of, but we've interviewed Ron on macro and cheese quite a bit. Um, and you know, he had written, you know, as a consultant, written many bills for her, good bills, and she took them. I mean, she was ready to fight for minting the coin, she's ready to fight for a lot of really cool things. Uh, so she's about the only one that I give a slight pass to, but when I came to a more egregious, more sad, depressing kind of awakening was that we don't live in a democracy, right? We do not live in a democracy. So now I have to not only deal with the fact that people don't understand economics, but I also got to deal with the fact that they still keep going back to the well, thinking just this next time will be different. No, no, no. You don't understand. This is the most important election of our lifetime. This time it'll be different, and it never is. And in fact, it just keeps furthering to the right. In fact, in Kamala Harris, Genocide Killer, you know, Kamala Harris and Genocide Joe, I mean, this most recent one was even worse because now that she got crushed, I mean, crushed, landslide, crushed. And the other progressive candidates didn't get crushed. Okay. Progressive policies didn't get crushed. She got crushed. Okay. And she got crushed because she was a soulless, absolutely vapid and vacuous candidate that was selling Wall Street, selling bullshit, selling lies to us. And it didn't resonate with anyone. And that's why she lost point blank. I mean, more women voted for uh Trump. Uh black, brown, Latina Muslim said, you know what, screw you, we're voting for Trump. A lot of people, you know, did I think Jill Stein maybe got uh not even a full percentage? Yeah, not even one percent. Okay, so don't blame third parties. This is all a hundred percent messaging, hundred percent priorities, hundred percent piss poor policy. I mean, there wasn't even ads out there saying Kamala doesn't need policy to win. Oh, really? Idiots. I what's his real quick, what's his name? Um, uh God Destiny, and out there saying when Kamala wins, we don't need those leftists, those crazy Gaza Hamas uh supporters, those terrorist sympathizers. We need to purge all of them from the party. So all this stuff really, really radicalized me. And now I am a post-electorist, post-duopolist, MMT informed leftist trying to radicalize people into organizing.

SPEAKER_01 13:15

So yeah, and listen, the post-elect that could be its own episode. So, first of all, I thank you for sharing that because for me, we have a very ideologically diverse audience, and I felt it was important, especially for those who are on the right wing that listen to us, for you to hear that you're not you aren't just born and raised in some blue no matter who situation. And so I think that sets the groundwork for how we're gonna talk about economics and some of the current things going on. So, I as promised when we talked off-air, I'm gonna do my best to summarize what I have gathered are the key points for MMT for those who don't know, because we are gonna link episodes to you talking about it more at length so we can get into some different topics. But please correct me and add to what I don't include that you find. I was like, no, you forgot this. Okay. So my understanding as a student is that modern monetary theory, the key thing with it in the United States context is that because we are a fiat currency, as you stated earlier, meaning our federal government issues the money is the currency, it it issues the currency, meaning it can print, it can do what it needs to do as far as money, it is not restrained by that. However, and that's all right, and that contrasts to say state, local, city governments where they need to receive the money because they can't print their own, that would be counterfeit. And how that relates to occurrency users, yes, how that relates to policy is that essentially the US government can afford any bill that it chooses to take on in terms of quote unquote paying it. However, that does not mean what people say, you just want inflation. In fact, modern monetary theorists are very concerned about inflation, but how they view inflation and how it occurs is very different. How they see inflation is we are limited with our spending by the actual material resources required to fulfill an order of uh for metaphorically speaking. And so the problem, for example, isn't can we do housing for all? If we chose to do that, we'd write the bill, the money would be appropriated accordingly digitally and all that type of stuff. The real issue is do we have the lumber, the workers, the all the things necessary to build a house? Because if we do not, we then run that issue of inflationary pressure due to a shortage on supply, not because of a pay for. Did I somewhat get what the core tenants are before we go further?

SPEAKER_02 15:37

Yes, I will say this. I would not caveat it with US. Any country that issues its own currency can do this. The key factor is the real resources, and it's not just the real resources, it's the productive capacity. Africa is just full of real resources. Yes, they're not full of that fine, that finishing product, that the technological advances, the the productive capacity to do that. What they lack is technology. So there's there's several forms of sovereignty that play into that food, energy, and production. So I would energy, you know, I would just keep that kind of uh I in other words, don't don't make the mistake of saying just the US, it's not US centric. That's all.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

Totally fair, totally fair. And I I love that because literally just from that point, I was like, oh, so many other conversations, but we are I'm gonna stay focused because I know what we come here to do. And so I was going to start with, you know what, we talk about healthcare a lot. So I said, let's go ahead and kick it off because this was the thing I saw you speak about, and I wanted to get into it. So, as progressives, one thing you said to me that really stuck out was talking about the difference between the politics and the policy. And I believe even earlier, and correct me if I misspoke, you said MNT has the policy, like it's already told us how we can handle it and execute policy. However, the people who study it are often not politicians. And we've noticed that there's a disconnect between the people who get in front of the podium or get elected and their ability to sell things because they are limited by whether it's intentional ignorance or whether it's just genuine ignorance to how federal spending works. And one popular policy that most leftists would agree is single payer healthcare system, Medicare for all, et cetera. And we always get asked the famous question how do you pay for it? And at one point, I think we were talking on the podcast, and I said, you know, as a person who was trying to learn MNT, I said, well, paying for it isn't the issue. The issue is, do we actually have the infrastructure for handling a healthcare system that is now being accessed by everybody? And I kept saying, I was like, it doesn't mean I don't support the policy because that would be the argument of people that I would hear. Well, that's why we don't need it. I'm like, no, you don't say we don't need the healthcare. You say, how are we gonna build the production? Hopefully that's the right word, to actually contain this. And I said, what does that look like? Is that a two to three year process? Do we need more immigration when it comes to Cuba has a lot of great doctors, other countries have doctors? We are there models and things that we can mimic because I'm a strong believer that if you JFK said it best, he said, we're gonna put a man on the moon, put a man on the moon. They didn't know how they were gonna do it, but that was the goal. And we galvanized the American people under something, a vision. And that's what I feel like the Democratic Party is lacking. The Republican Party have a vision, it's just one I don't agree with. So if you could speak to how that is accurate, and more importantly, how what's the critical flaw that people are missing when they talk about it? And you talk about the uh deinflation, et cetera, which is something I can't explain. So if you could.

SPEAKER_02 18:42

Yeah, so let's just start with two things. Two key things before we even talk about it. This is universal to all policy, not just healthcare policy. If you think about real resources, that's not just like gold, silver, water, rock, whatever. That's people, that's you know, process, that's computing power, that's whatever, whatever it takes to do a thing. Do you have those things? Do you have the productive capacity to do those things? That's one. The other thing is kind of the the funnier one, which is you know, how are you gonna finance it, right? Like, like the the concept of how do you pay for these things and how you pay for it is extremely important, right? Okay, and you said deflation, which is the thing I use, that that um you know MMT would say that something like Medicare for All is deflationary. Well, we're gonna tie all three of these things together, okay? So when you think about spending, whenever the government spends, that's someone's income. Okay. So whenever you spend, that's someone else's income. One man's spending is another man's income. So when the federal government chooses to spend, okay, it it it literally writes a bill and issues money to spend directly on that thing to whoever the contractors are. So when you see federal contracting things like that, money gets spent directly. It's not printed in pallets and shoved off into a corner and used when they need it. They spend money into existence. So the government's spending money constantly into existence and it's constantly taxing it out of existence, right? It's kind of like the the circuit. So when it comes to health care and stuff like that, you know, healthcare is made up of a lot of money grabs from uh promoting a million of the same drug to uh all this advertising for whatever that doesn't need to be done. Um it is also wasted on all the people that deny claims to the service denial business. That's still GDP, that's still money in the system. When you have a single payer system, the single payer system eliminates all that. Right? There's it's this doesn't matter. So you're going to have a reduction in GDP hypothetically, okay? Because giving people care is a lot cheaper than all the denial. And so within that space, a lack of spending of any variety creates recessionary pressures, right? Because it's reducing spending. That's austerity, even though it may not feel like it, it's austerity. And uh you have to replace that spending. Just because you cut spending doesn't mean you save money. Money doesn't exist until it's spent into existence. Okay, so this is important to remember one of the number one things people get wrong. Hey, we if we didn't send money to Israel, we could afford to pay. No, you could do both. Stop. We don't want to do both because it's morally corrupt and disgusting. Yeah, but we can do both. This is the key. And so then you have the conservatives coming at you like, well, if the government does this, there'll be six months waiting period, lines out the door. You're never gonna get your heart transplant because everybody blah blah blah. Well, what it comes down to is there's not enough uh doctors, nurses, you know, hospitals, clinics, whatever to get people to get take. If you give everybody health care today, our system is not strong enough. It has been built on a capitalist mindset of profit accumulation and capital accumulation, not on service. So if it was based on service The government, to your earlier point, would have to train more doctors, nurses, phlebotomists, you know, whatever, specialists, on and on and on. And because we don't like a planned economy, because we don't like planning things out, GOP and the Democrats both fight about it because what happens? People want immediate gratification. They don't understand that it may take five years of prep to make it so that we can do this great thing. It's like the space stuff that you brought up with JFK. Bottom line, there is no man on the moon without a decade of research, development, building, all that stuff. You had to play, you had to create astronauts. There was no such thing as an astronaut day one, day two, there is. How did that happen? A massive training play. They had no idea what they needed to train, so they're shaking them up, doing all kinds of crazy stuff. I'm sure being an astronaut looks different today than it did 50 years ago, right?

SPEAKER_00 23:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:28

But this is all the process of getting there. So health care in the end would be deflationary because it's going to reduce spend. Even though we're giving everybody health care, it's a lot cheaper to keep people healthy than it is in the end to try to fix them after they're broke. So there's a lot of things here that you have to understand. So ultimately, MMT is uh just a description of the way a fiat currency works. It's not something to be implemented. So right now we could do it. There's no implementing MMT. This could be done. But you ask yourself, okay, so we reduce spending, we create a recession. What does that mean? Well, you hear every Democrat going, I would be happy to pay more for someone else to have health care. Uh raise my taxes higher. I'm happy to do it. But it's exactly counterintuitive, right? Because if you raise taxes, you're doing double austerity. Not only have you reduced spending, but now you're raising taxes. And if you heard me, taxes take money out of the system. So now you're creating a money fam and you're creating recessionary pressures. So this is becomes a deflationary event. So the way to counter that deflationary event is not to raise taxes, it's to decrease taxes for Medicare for all. So everybody wins triple big, right? But the problem is that people are religiously wed to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher's uh taxpayer dollar mindset. They believe it's their taxpayer dollars that are paying for it all. They don't realize that the currency creator, the currency issue, the origin of money is the federal government. Okay. And when it writes a bill, it spends money into existence. It's not coming from you. You're not going to bankrupt the government. The government can't go bankrupt. It is the creator of its own currency. As long as it can impose a tax or an obligation payable only in the currency, like fines, fees, and penalties, that currency is going to hold its fine. It's going to be fine. So long as it's a legal tender for settling debts, it will be fine. It doesn't matter about confidence in the dollar. That's trader nonsense. The dollar, when you go to buy uh electricity, you go to buy food or whatever, they take dollars for it. Okay. And we can get into inflation and stuff like that later. I'm sure that's something we'll want to talk about. Absolutely. That right there is a favorite trope. So, what do they get wrong? They think that, oh, you're blowing money, you're spending money, you're going to create inflation. No, Medicare for all is deflationary, it's the opposite.

SPEAKER_01 26:05

So, hopefully, that answered the question. No, it really did. And you listen, I know you all are listening thinking, oh my God, wait, he talked about. So, what is our taxes for? I promise you, David and I are committed to doing an episode specifically about taxes through modern monetary theory because that's its own thing. Um, and we are going to talk about inflation, but I want David, I has his own thoughts about 401ks, and I saw you recently speak on this, so I didn't get to finish your clip on it. So I'm excited about this, but I'll let David set it up.

SPEAKER_00 26:32

Yeah, I worked for a CPA for about four and a half years and just overhearing some of the tax meetings and just like, but yeah, no, I was I I said similar to you about like the the tax credits are like a coupon. Uh like that's that's really what it is. But I have been known to say that my dream job is early retirement. And I um heard you speak a couple of weeks ago on the real progress, on real progress in action about 401ks. And you talked a little bit about Verizon and your retirement account and 401ks and your family who had pensions and about kind of balance of risk. So I live in Colorado, and Colorado now has a statewide requirement, uh law that went into effect called Colorado Secure Savings, where every single employer is required to offer a retirement plan, generally a 401k, to all employees with five, with all to all companies with five or more employees. And they don't have to do any sort of employer match, they just have to offer it. I am also part of this advisory council for a payroll company. And one of the government relations folks who did lobbying to get this law into effect said the state plans. So there are two different options. There's there are private plans that employers can participate in, where the company pays the management fees. And then there's also a state-run plan. And that the fees are deducted from what the employees contribute in their retirement savings. And the government relations person said the public plans were designed to be inferior. And that was really frustrating for me to hear. And then to also hear how these retirement mandates for generally 401ks are being kind of pushed out state by state. There are multiple other states that have these in addition to Colorado. So I'm curious, just kind of your reactions and your thoughts to like a program like this, and also maybe like what we could do differently or that, or a different idea of what we could do for retirement that would benefit more people instead of like these hedge funds.

SPEAKER_02 29:09

Yeah, no, absolutely. So I'm I'm anti-capitalist, and that means a lot of things. Okay. I am anti-finance capital in so many ways as well. Um, so when you think about what private savings like that are, private um investment schemes like that, they are leveraging the unpaid wages of the people in those industries. So you're skimming money off that for your retirement, right? For no, you did nothing. It's passive income. You threw your money over there and you skimmed away some of their profit and so forth. That is what Republicans desperately want for everyone. They want to get rid of Social Security, they want to do a lot of that stuff. Uh, there's a lot of Democrats like Hillary Clinton that want to do that as well. Okay, so this is a bipartisan screw job here. Um that said, the states are not currency issuers, right? So the states have very limited ability to do things other than to mandate that businesses do them. Well, if you understand the way business operates, business has a fiduciary responsibility. They have responsibility, shareholders, legal responsibility to maximize shareholder value, to maximize profits. So that means that everything they do has to be in terms of either gutting someone or raising prices and passing that on to someone. So everything is kind of zero sum at the state level because states are not currency issuers. This is why you can't do a state-by-state Medicare kind of arrangement because states are not currency issuers. If we had a pandemic and you had state-based, they'd be bankrupt in no time, right? They wouldn't, they wouldn't have the infrastructure, they wouldn't have the money, and they'd be begging Uncle Sam to cover the the delta, right? Yeah, um, so uh the way this could work super easy is if you look at social security at the federal level, we have been convinced and lied to forever. FDR made a convenient lie, which he did politically, to get skin in the game. So people felt like they had an ownership stake in in Social Security. He also lied to everybody about the reason for war bonds back during World War II as well, uh, which I'd love to get into after this. Uh but what ends up happening is that the federal government is the currency issue for Social Security as well. Every dollar that you receive from Social Security is a new dollar from the federal government. There's no piggy bank with old rolled up, you know, 1919 dollars and hay pennies and buffalo nickels in it. It's not like that. What it is, is it's like if you ever ride down the road and you see one of those rubber things across the road and you ride across and goes dunk dunk, and it there's a little ticker that says tick-tick, yep, another car went by, tick-tick, another car went by. That's what they do with the Social Security Trust Fund, which is basically a spreadsheet, okay? It's there's no money, it's not real money. And uh what the law states is that the trust fund has authority to make payments. It doesn't say that the money's coming from the trust fund, it's saying that the trust fund has the authority to make payments. The federal government is still making the payments, your checks are still coming from the treasury. Nothing has changed in that respect. Every dollar spent is a new dollar. Government never re-spends a dollar, it spends it once into the economy, it does a bunch of stuff, and then it comes back as a tax and it's gone, just like a coupon, right? So, in this case, when you think about what we could do uh with Social Security, it's a law, it's not something that was born out of it's not Mount Everest, it's it's a law that man made. And so we could choose to eliminate FICA altogether, no more deductions for FICA. You could choose to change all the different parameters by which people receive Social Security immediately. You could say instead of giving people only this meal-y mouth based on the earnings they've done over a period of time, you could say everyone will receive a living wage from Social Security once they hit 55. You could start it at 55, you could start at 50. You could 35. Well, we'll get into that in a minute.

SPEAKER_00 33:31

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 33:32

That that one right there creates a bit of a problem because you know there's well-meaning people out there, and a lot of them running around saying they want a UBI. Okay. But the UBI is money into the economy without production backing it up. There's no production to it. Okay. So it's just what is money? Money is a tax credit. So if you're just giving money out there, okay, and you're not building the productive capacity to absorb that into the economy, that will create inflationary effects because now you'll have people with more money, more disposable income, but not an economy to back it up. So there's all it goes back to the Medicare for all. If you don't have the real resources for all that stuff, but what happens if you get all these workers suddenly on retirement, suddenly kicking back? Now you don't have the productive capacity. And I know automated, uh, what is it, gay uh uh uh communism or whatever, space communism, whatever it is. I mean, we're gonna have a society. Sign me up. We're gonna have a society where everybody's just chill will and automation's doing everything for us. It's not a real thing. I know that there is the the march of the robots and all that stuff, but it's not a real thing. And there are the remember the wagon wheel maker, the wagon wheel maker hates the steel radial, the the abacus despises the calculator, right? I mean, so there's there's all these things that we just get so wrapped up in it, but there's always work to be done, and we can handle that with a federal job guarantee, but that's another story for another day. But within the space of your 401k scenario, I don't believe that we should be waiting for the free market to tell us what my retirement is. Yeah, I believe that we can take at a federal level and say everyone will receive whatever it is, whatever we decide collectively. Now, I don't believe we have agency to do this, unfortunately, no matter what I'm saying. Okay. But I believe in this fair and just society where we actually have a democratic process and we actually have the ability to voice our concerns and see them acted upon. Uh, unlike with Gaza, where the students were beaten for protesting us, you know, a genocide. Um, I believe that in a society where we actually have uh people being able to make decisions in that society, that there's nothing that would stop us from giving everyone $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month, whatever that amount is that allows it. But I'm also a big believer in something that most people don't talk about as part of this package, which is universal basic services for all from cradle to grave. Okay. So instead of commodifying our needs, let's provide our needs. If you want to have capitalism, which I want to completely kill dead on arrival, but if people we can't get there, I would much rather say, let's go ahead and provide our needs universally, and let's go ahead and capitalize the wants. Okay. Yes. And I believe that by doing this, by taking away the commodification of our existence, of our survival, that you're going to see a dramatic decrease in crime. You're going to see a dramatic decrease in early death and unnecessary deaths and and a whole host of other societal harms that just come from poverty and and from desperation. So, on one hand, I'm like, you know, yes, make social security whatever, because I don't the 401k plan. I mean, I have one, we all have one that work in professional.

SPEAKER_00 37:02

I think they're pyramid schemes, personally, but yeah, they're definitely not they're definitely not the answer, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_02 37:12

Yeah, right now they're better than absolutely nothing, but then again, so is breathing trapped in you know a uh chamber of fire. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 37:21

I mean, like you know, you just described the Democratic Party.

SPEAKER_02 37:23

We're better than nothing, exactly. But but what do you want, Trump? Right, right. I just I think that it's really important to realize the real thing is the real thing, the main thing is the main thing, and it goes back to real resources, right? What do people need in retirement? I need a home, I don't want to worry about paying my mortgage, I need food, I don't want to be worrying about where I find food. I need clothing, I don't want to have to be forced to run around naked, fat, and old and droopy. I want to be able to have some clothes to cover that shit up, you know. Yeah, I want to be able to, you know, I want to be able to be educated if I want to be. I want to be able to learn, I want to be able to enjoy my life without worrying about how to survive, and that's all completely doable, right? That's not some fantasy that really is doable. Um, so that is the power of our currency. It we could literally provide everyone with payments, but you have to have the the economy there to support that. We could provide everyone the real resources, and by providing them the real resources, the money is going to ensure the real resources are there. Because let's say hypothetically, you and I and and Day, all of us have our own $10,000, and that's all we have. You sure as hell better be able to negotiate everything you need if you're a soloist, if you're an Ayn Rand, libertarian acolyte, and you're trying to make hell, you know, make it rain by yourself. You better know every trick of the trade because you are on your own. And there are some people that are really good at it, and this is why they love this a me, myself, and I approach because they're better. But that's no way to survive in a society, it's no way to structure society that some prosper and others drown and die, right? Yep. Some people say, Hey, that's the way it is, man. People it's nothing guaranteed. You we who cares if you die, right? And you can see that in COVID. There was a lot of that going on. Yeah, but in my opinion, the way to create a government that represents the people is to decommodify their needs. Go ahead if you want to keep a little capitalism in there for their wants and provide direct payments and provide direct real resource, universal basic services, uh, for all, not in retirement, for all from cradle to grave.

SPEAKER_01 39:40

So I love that because to me, I I I've been saying this a lot lately that the universe, I love the universal basic services aspect of it because it aligns with what I said. The government's job per its own constitution is to secure the rights of liberty, pursuit of happiness. And I've literally never messed up and not started with the right life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There you go. And I said, How can those things be provided if people are literally struggling for their basic to me? That is the definition of tech taking care of people's basic needs, like you said. And then in the wants, let's have fun. You want blue cotton candy floss, you want cinnamon dental floss, go at it. And I think I had someone I said this once before, and they were like, You can't get rid of all of uh homelessness or all of poverty. I said, But shouldn't that be the goal? If it's not the you could, first of all, you could you could, but just morally, if that's not the goal, we've already lost it. And I said, United, one day Americans have to start caring more about Americans than the concept of America. And I think right now a libertarian dream is creating this America and this night, this American dream, which is really just a bad, really bad nightmare, because they've told people, you can be anything, you could be the person to be the exception. Instead of thinking, look to your left, look to your right, bring your next person up with you. And when we all get to the surface, we can all go out and spread out on the beach. And that's really what my hope is in these upcoming Trump years is that we can all wake up to that realization that it's really possible. And you know, we're getting close to time here, but you did mention the war bonds. And so I have to ask because the war bonds and how those lies kind of gave, you know, were like the catalyst of some of the current propaganda and things. So please talk about that.

SPEAKER_02 41:21

Yeah. So, you know, back during World War II, we had to get every uh production plant, every manufacturing plant to pump out the war machine to really create the bombs, the tanks, the planes, the boats, you know, the guns, whatever it is, shoot boots for the military, uniforms for the military. Everybody was working in these factories around the clock. So if you suddenly wanted to buy a PlayStation in 1942 or whatever it was, right? It's a joke. I mean, that was a frivolous purchase that the production wasn't available for. And so what they did was to tame inflation to keep people's buying power down so that they didn't have the money to go out and just drive up the cost of things. They went ahead and made it more challenging, and they made it more of a patriotic duty to fund the war machine by buying bonds. What do bonds do? At the time, the primary goal was to take money out of the productive economy and put it off to the side to delay buying power. Okay, we're gonna offer you an interest rate that you'll it's like a savings account. That's all bonds are really a time box savings account. Okay, there's nothing fancy about national debt, it is a sum total of every untaxed dollar in the economy. You know, it's not you know something we we don't borrow dollars we create from China, you know. I mean, we don't do anything, it's crazy, right? So China prints our money and we go get it. I mean, it's humorous because you see the video of Obama saying it'll be immoral, we'll have to take out a credit card from the People's Republic of China, you know, and all this stuff. So, you know, these people are liars, they're paid liars. It's like, hey, the architects of the system don't know how the system works, really. Hmm.

SPEAKER_01 43:11

So they can spend everything for the military they want, you know. Deficits in there. No, don't ask questions.

SPEAKER_02 43:20

It's a fair question that normies ask that don't understand economics. How come they have money for bombs? How come they have money for this, that, and the other, but they don't have money for teachers, they don't have money for healthcare, they don't have money for you know whatever necessity we think we need. How come we don't have money for that? And so conservatives naturally look over there and they're like, Well, hey, you're taking my lunch money, hey, you're taking Schrdinger's immigrant, you're taking my job, but you're lazy. Wait a minute, which is it? You know, and so you've got all these misnomers, all these false beliefs based on you know, national debt, deficit myth, all these things. And the war bonds were proof positive that you know we were building this stuff regardless. What they were doing was just trying to keep the main thing, the main thing. We were at war with Nazi Germany, and thank goodness for the Ruskies because they're the ones that liberated us all. But regardless, the point is that bonds are merely a way they're a time box savings account, and they were used to take money out of the productive economy to delay purchasing power and to keep production. Rolling for the war machine. And we look at bonds today, it's very important because part of what we saw today is that they raised interest rates in an effort to kill inflation. So for years, interest rates have shot up through the roof, mortgage rates through the roof. Everybody's cost of living through the roof. However, by raising interest rates, what you did was gave a basic income to the people who already had money. Okay. So the rich made money off of all these investments. The problem is you got retirement funds trapped in that as well. So they did good, right? So at some level you say, well, Granny made out. Who cares if Musk made out better? Right. But the reality is that we could have done that. We could have made the choice to fund Granny without giving free money to the billionaire class. Yeah. But we didn't. And that lie is persistent because everybody's like, well, you're going to have inflation if you print money. You're going to have, but that's not it at all. And we already talked about it kind of. It's the shortage of real resources. And more importantly, I'll leave you with this Ted bit. Go out and check out Isabella Weber. She is an economist that really spoke to the concept of greedflation, if you will, like corporations literally raising prices because we gave them signals. What were those signals? Every knucklehead around said they're printing money. It's causing inflation. And businesses are like, hey man, those idiots are saying it's going to cause inflation. Let's give them what they want. And they raise prices, sometimes up to a thousand percent more. Okay. Pandemic. Well, we, you know, Biden, the Biden economy. Well, Biden didn't do us any favors. He did, I got to give the man credit and it hurts. The chip sack, the one thing about that, the only thing about that was a recognition that globalization had failed us, that exporting production everywhere but in the US had kind of hurt us more than it helped us. And here we were in a pandemic when it shut things down and they couldn't make cell phone parts, they couldn't make computer parts. They couldn't do so, all these backlogs from big companies like Cisco, because they couldn't produce their router switches, high-end computing gear, they had no choice. This drove up costs, kept people, you know, shipping costs, all these things. But it wasn't never about printing money, ever. And and this is an unfortunate thing because this administration that's come in is talking about, you know, basically backing Bitcoin at the Fed. And and this is a a once again another privatization scheme that literally destroys the public purpose, destroys the public safety net, destroys the commons that we all should be striving for. And me as a leftist, that's where my hope and heart lies, is that we all can benefit by creating that full robust commons, that public space that we all thrive in. And uh we're a long way away from fixing any of that, buddy.

unknown 47:18

Buddy.

SPEAKER_02 47:18

No, but it's possible.

SPEAKER_01 47:20

This episode has talked about it. How it is possible.

SPEAKER_00 47:23

So I I thank you for that. Yeah, it is possible. Steve, thank you. Where can people support you and your work?

SPEAKER_02 47:31

So I am the CEO and president of two different nonprofits. One is Real Progressives, the other one is, as you said, Real Progress in Action. Real Progress in Action is a 501c4 where I do a lot of my kind of political angled work. The 501c3, which is Real Progressives, is there to really teach people. It's an education place, it's an organizing place as well. Um, but we produce a podcast, as we've stated, called Macro and Cheese that comes out every Saturday morning. Uh, you can go to our website, realprogressives.org. You can find macro, the letter N, and then cheese on Spotify, Apple, iTunes, Amazon, Amazon, all the rest of them, right? And uh, I used to do something called the Rogue Scholar. We're looking at possibly bringing that back. Uh, but as of now, I do a lot of Tuesday night appearances at Status Quo, and I'm a frequent guest over there on Generational Change with Jim Prolman.

SPEAKER_01 48:28

Yes, yes. Well, first of all, we can't thank you enough for taking time out with us to be our first guest in this new series. Season five season five, which is crazy to me, but so grateful to the audience. I know you all, for many of you, this is probably the first in-depth conversation you've had about modern monetary theory, and you have lots of questions. So please feel free to reach out to us, call me limbopod at gmail.com or on all our socials. We would love to get your questions because as you guys listen, there were so many things I was taking note of. Okay, we're gonna have an episode about this. You really foreshadowed a great season, serious uh season if we can get everybody that we have in our head. So thank you so much for doing that. It means the world to me. You are truly one of my political heroes, and I'm so grateful you took this time today. And we normally have like this funny goofy outro um for everything. But today we're gonna keep it really simple. Um, we just want to thank you all for supporting us. You know, you can support us financially if you go to patreon.com slash call me limbopod. It really helps out. Make sure we will have the link to everything, Steve Grumbine. You have to check it out. I promise you, education is power, and we need that as voters. And of course, my favorite thing to say, David, of course, is remember when that go low. I forgot my own thing.

SPEAKER_00 49:43

We invite Steve Grumbine to talk about modern monetary theory. That's right. So call me so call me limbo. Bye.