Paying To Save The World

How to pay for Saving the World

Presentation based on Jason Hickle's article "How to pay for saving the world" re degrowth with MMT: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800923002318

Both MMT and degrowth talk about using money as a public good. In MMT the amount of money that a government can create should be limited by the amount of inflation caused and the availability of resources to be mobilized by the money created. Degrowth adds social and ecological limits, reduction of supply and demand, universal basic services and a job guarantee. States with their own currency are not constrained by debt if the resources to be mobilized are available. Commercial banks also create money via loans. A degrowth model calls for greater decentralized and localized control of centrally created funds. It also calls for an end to planned obsolescence and the reduction of unnecessary industries (advertising, war, fast fashion, etc), increased taxation of the wealthiest, reduced inequality, and reduced ecological destruction. Fair taxation and reduced inequality make sense because the wealthiest produce disproportionately greater pollution than the rest of us. Additional measures could be a ceiling on credit rates, price controls, complementary currencies, organic agriculture, reduced construction, and a cap on wage discrepancies.

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The US dollar is relatively stable because of a number of reasons. For example, after World War II, it was decided to make the US dollar the primary currency for trade because the US economy came out of the war better than that of Britain and other allies. At first, the dollar was tied to the price of gold. Much of the industrial production that made the US economy strong has since been outsourced to other countries so that the US imports more than it exports. When it was no longer possible to back up the dollar for its purchases with gold, the US struck a deal with Saudi Arabia to provide them with weapons, and in exchange the Saudis would sell oil only in exchange for US dollars. To date, the US dollar is still the primary, but not the only currency used in international trade.