by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-12-12 00:06:52+00:00
Okok, i am explaining it all as good as i can but i wished you did the work yourself, because you are in the best spot intellectual challenge your believes, so i am giving you one last chance.

What is money and where does it come from today?

You often see talking heads, arguing about future policies and the, usually conservative guy, argues against social spending with "where the money should come from." This implies that money must be earned before you can spend it. This take is not just blatantly false, when you look at the private sector (eg. big mergers entirely financed by credit), its even more false for states that have a special/privileged role in the economic system.

Other, usually conservative, political projects barely get publicly challenged on the financial level. I am asking you again, what happens, when a giant bill, eg. for the iraq/afghan war, has to be paid, what does a state do? How does it work? Budget bills enforce what, where?

... they force a financial gov.dept. (dont know which one in the US) to just spend that money for a project, that budget bill authorizes. To do so they manage their own assets (taxpayer money) but they are also capable of taking on debt from private lenders via bonds or from banks as credits. So, by the brush of a pencil, there can be enough money to finance anything you wish for! There really is no upper bound when your country has monetary autonomy and/or has good credit rating, but where does this debt come from?

In the case of bonds, the answer is easy, private buyers spent their existing money and hand it over to you. The case for banks is much more interesting and systemicly relevant, because banks also have a privileged position.

Private banks have the ability to *create* debt/money from nothing (so does the central bank), since there is no backing of gold anymore. Private banks are required by law to hold maybe 10% of their credit activas as own capital reserve, but once their credit is out there it might become another banks asset, that now can lend out 9x of that value again. You can repeat that process indefinitely to get an infinite money supply.

This is the current world we live in. Money is debt, created by privileged institutions, handed out to privileged lenders. (And on all of it ticks interest!) When ever i hear someone like you, bringing the "government printing press" argument, i cringe internally, because private banks have the same ecomically vital ability and with the exception of banking/market laws and profitability, totally unchecked.

The scarcity of money only applies to the unprivileged/poor. And only corrupt or clueless politicans consider their countries finances as the finances of a regular low-income household. The ever increasing private wealth is enabled by ever increasing state debt, which is not a bad thing in and off itself! Rich people are not really the problem, unless unjustly earned, the development of wealth is!

I want to challenge your zero-sum thinking, of that classical monetaristic theory, that doesnt really capture the true nature of money. Modern monetary theroy, MMT, tries to do just that.

In MMT you have money sources and sinks. Ideally, a state or central bank is in control of how much money is created as debt and how much of it is paid back and vanishes *via taxation*. This creation and annihilation of money is out of balance for decades now!

Your question

> Where does the new money come from?

focuses on the source-side, which i explained broadly above, but is pretty much irrelevant today, because we have created enough money already in the past. The sink-side is politically and societally much more pressing, because having this gigantic wealth concentration, almost totally detached from and without any proportion to the real economy, with ticking interests and outside of public control, is like a hostage sitation. We need ever more money to keep our society up, but fiscal hawks keep reminding us, that we are not in charge of it.

Traders call it a "correction", when expectations meet reality and the stocks fall and technically and in the case of the US (as other countries too), such a correction is long overdue. GDP and stock markets go up while public spending and quality of live for the many go down. All enabled by banking deregulation and public/gov. retreat out of that domain of power, so the parasites can keep their unsustainable party rolling by throwing around funny money. And all the while, right-wing internet brainlets throw up something like "governments cant be responsible with money" or "we have no money for that very-needed-thing". This bullshit reaches back to reagan/thatcher, where this imo deliberate attack on fiscal public souvereignity originated. MMT is highly controversial in economic academia because this acadmic field is an exceptional joke (see their "nobel" price or that they still have no reliant model for crashes) and because MMT flips the existing power structure upside down, simply by highlighting the dynamic nature of uncapped money and the importance of proportional sinks/taxation.

> If poor people are spending more now then someone has to spend less. Who is it?

This implies that heavy taxation on the super rich will impact their spending behavior. I dont think this will be the case but even if, it will be totally worth it to keep the social fabric alive.

My depiction is probably grossly inaccurate but i think the broad strokes are true.