Hacker Cinema
Finding the Money
2024 · Film · documentary · 95 min
Directed by Maren Poitras
FINDING THE MONEY follows economist Stephanie Kelton on a journey through Modern Money Theory or “MMT”. Kelton provocatively asserts the National Debt Clock that ticks ominously upwards in New York City is not actually a debt for us taxpayers at all, nor a burden for our grandchildren to pay back. Instead, Kelton describes the national debt as simply a historical record of the number of dollars created by the US federal government currently being held in pockets, as assets, by the rest of us. MMT bursts into the media with journalists asking, “Have we been thinking about how the government spends money, all wrong?” But top economists from across the political spectrum condemn the theory as “voodoo economics”, “crazy” and “a crackpot theory”. FINDING THE MONEY traces the conflict all the way back to the story we tell about money, injecting new hope and empowering countries around the world to tackle the biggest challenges of the 21st century: from climate change to inequality.
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2 comments on Hacker News
Read The Deficit Myth by Stephanie Kelton and watch the film Finding the Money to find out how this "debt storm" is neither debt, nor a storm.
> It’s a textbook outcome from easily identifiable policy choices.
There's no wide agreement that either MMT or Fiat currency is that predictable.
The case for MMT and "printing money" (right or wrong) is made in popular books such as Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy
https://www.amazon.com/Deficit-Myth-Monetary-Peoples-Economy/dp/1541736184
and explored in documentaries such as Finding the Money (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27513787/) and PIIGS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piigs)
These may or may not convince you, but they might assist in understanding the opposing viewpoint.