I don’t say that “tax rates had zero effect”, I say that there is no point in which it is evident that lowering taxes clearly helped.

You are quoting yourself out of context. Your very next sentence:

If progressively lowering taxes over the last 68 years was helping our economy, the blue line should look like the right half of the letter ‘U’.

Logic 101 says that if a proposion is true, its contrapositive is true. Therefore, if the second sentence is true, then if the blue line does not look like the right half of the letter ‘U,’ progressively lowering taxes over the last 68 years was not helping our economy. If you want to amend your second sentence to be consistent with your first, that’s fine with me. But I take my contrapositives as I find them. Was the point of the plot to show that there was no clear effect, or that there clearly was no effect?

I don’t understand your point about appealing to the bandwagon. But I think you are wrong to dismiss MMT. I believe it is not only sound thinking, but essential thinking. Indeed, the very reorientation you are seeking is one in which MMT is allowed to do what it can do. Your penultimate paragraph is completely consistent with MMT, and I agree with it completely. My point is that there is way more stuff for dollars to buy than can be bought with the dollars a balanced budget can crank out. MMT provides the bridge from balanced budget to adequate aggregate demand.

I did not suggest that inflation was serendipitous. It’s the result of printing too much money and not taxing enough of it out of existence. I am not in favor of fiddling with tax rates. People need to plan, and a stable tax environment is essential to good planning. Rather, monetary and fiscal policy, especially government spending and interest rates, should be designed to prevent undue inflation.

A budget deficit is a leading indicator and inflation is a trailing indicator. Any planner worth his salt will prefer the leading indicator, because trailing indicators come too late to prevent themselves. The output gap is a leading indicator, or, it would be if it could be measured. And the good planner prefers an accurate metric (the budget deficit) to a guesstimate (the output gap). Nevertheless, a balanced budget leaves too much potential production unproduced. Here, the old saw about the best being the enemy of the good is reversed: the good metric and indicator is very much the enemy of the best economy.

I don’t understand your last paragraph. All I can say is that MMT does not ignore the consequences of creating or destroying money. It is all about those consequences. Some MMTers overestimate the practical license their theory provides, but that’s not really the fault of the theory. At the end of the day, the paragraph mounts an ad hominem attack on MMT’s less thoughtful advocates, not a critique of the theory itself. The claim is fair, but it is not the end of the story.