Unemployment Numbers: The Long View

[Lefty Thinker]

2. I came to the same conclusion

I've become a devotee of Modern Monetary Theory because of its emphasis on mathematical consistency with national accounting. It basically says that attacking the deficit directly in a time of low demand will only exacerbate the unemployment situation and, because of the "automatic stabilizers," will never be as effective expected.

MMT (which only applies to fiat currencies) also decouples net government spending from borrowing. Thus, there is not necessarily a need to pay anything back in times of growth. MMT gives good, quantitative rules for responding to observable metrics, both for recessions and boom times.