Philip Pilkington has worked with Smart Taxes and the Economic Working Group of the Irish Environmental Pillar on the Green Job Guarantee. Here he has partnered with MMT economist and market maven Warren Mosler and convinced the prestigious Levy Institute to publish their idea for Tax-Backed Bonds. Here is Philip’s own introduction to the paper posted in Naked Capitalism.
Philip Pilkington: MMT to the Rescue in the the Eurozone?
By Philip Pilkington, a writer and journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. You can follow him on Twitter at @pilkingtonphil
We’ve already seen how, paraphrasing Archimedes, that financial instruments can move the world in a bad way. We have an opportunity to reverse that. Warren Mosler and I have just published a policy note at the Levy Institute that would, if implemented, bring an end to the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis.
The ‘tax-backed bond’ or ‘Mosler bond’ is based on the MMT idea that fiat money gets its value because the government
accepts it in the payment of taxes. As the MMTers have been saying since the Eurozone crisis began the reason that the European periphery nations are having such a hard time with their sovereign debt burdens is because they do not issue their own currencies. The policy note we have just published outlines a new approach to the problem. The country will issue new tax-backed bonds that in the event a sovereign proves unable to meet its financial obligation to its creditors can be used to repay taxes in the country in question.
The policy note itself is short and readable enough (I hope), so for further information I’d ask the reader consult the document in the original. Here I would prefer to deal with the politics of the tax-backed bond approach and the chances we have of getting it accepted.
