Bidenomics, also known as MMT

Sometimes ideas that seem obviously silly catch on and cause serious destruction. In the late 2000s Australian economist Bill Mitchell coined the term “Modern Monetary Theory," or MMT, to describe what one might call Keynesianism on steroids. But on the left, MMT caught on as an explanation for why Barack Obama’s nearly $800 billion stimulus plan in 2009 failed to yield anything like the promised 4% annual growth. In 2021 MMT gave the administration and Democratic lawmakers an academic imprimatur for the avalanche of spending, four times as large as Mr. Obama’s stimulus 12 years earlier. In a testament to MMT’s sway, 17 Nobel economics laureates signed a 2021 statement asserting that all this spending “will ease longer-term inflationary pressures."