this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
16 points (100.0% liked)
Progressive Politics
4616 readers
941 users here now
Welcome to Progressive Politics! A place for news updates and political discussion from a left perspective. Conservatives and centrists are welcome just try and keep it civil :)
(Sidebar still a work in progress post recommendations if you have them such as reading lists)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Leftist critique (not attempting to shit on Mamdani, just food for thought):
"Balancing the budget" on public finances is right wing propaganda. The public sector literally creates an indefinitely big amount of dollars, and fighting for "balancing the budget" implies restricting expenditure arbitrarily. This expenditure could fund welfare policy, improved social services, public housing, infrastructure...
The public sector isn't (or rather shouldn't be in practice) restricted by funding constraints, and any attempt to say otherwise is neoliberal propaganda designed to justify budget cuts to welfare.
Local government isn't a currency issuer though. Sure a city can issue bonds but that's real debt, just like household debt.
Currency issuing governments, well yeah that's another story.
Notice how I didn't say local government. I specifically said not to criticise Mamdani because it's not his fault, but he could and should be doing MMT propaganda explaining these concepts and showing how absurd it is that we make the political decision of giving this arbitrary limit to public spending at the local level.
I more or less agree with your point. But it's hardly fair to make a comment in a thread about a specific topic then get upset if people discuss it in the context of that topic.
The public sector should be constrainted by funding and that funding should be remediated via taxes.
Money isn't supposed to be infinate. The system as is requires uncapped spending.
No, it shouldn't. Governments can literally create any amounts of money. At times, the correct economic policy is to have more deficit, at times the correct economic policy is to have less deficit, and being arbitrarily bounded by artificial balance budgets (which don't apply to entities capable of issuing their own currency) implies unnecessary suffering for many.
You didn't argue anything from knowledge, you just proudly stated your uneducated opinion on the topic.
This doesn't even make sense, you're contradicting yourself, finite money and uncapped spending are literally impossible to have together. Are you an AI?
Just make more money! Who would have thought of that? Your educated opinion is quite impressive.
p.s. the US government doesn't issue their own currency, that's the Fed.
Modern Monetary Theory economists. Randall Wray, Alberto Garzón, Stephanie Kelton. John Maynard Keynes... Apparently it's such a radical thought that fools like you without economic training whatsoever can't even conceive it, and it takes scholars with decades of study of macroeconomics to realize that the limits to public spending shouldn't be arbitrary and should be dictated by macroeconomic needs and policy