> ... Ms. Kelton, and the movement she has come to represent, now seem anxious to control the narrative. The pandemic spending wasn’t entirely consistent with M

> ... Ms. Kelton, and the movement she has come to represent, now seem anxious to control the narrative. The pandemic spending wasn’t entirely consistent with M.M.T principles, they say — it wasn’t assessed carefully for its inflationary effects as it was being drawn up, because it was crisis policy. But the situation has underlined how hard it is to know just where the economy’s constraints lay, and how difficult it is to fix things once you run into them. > .. carefully assessed for its inflationary effects .. Ah, yeah, so spending might indeed have inflationary effects, sometimes. > ... how hard it is to know just where the economy’s constraints lay, and how difficult it is to fix things once you run into them. Hm, how about we stick to more basic principles such as "more money usually means inflation" whenever we're dealing with an admittedly complex system where it's difficult if not impossible to predict the exact outcome? Like when you're blasting a mysterious black box with unknown contents using a blow torch ... the box might in mysterious ways temporarily keep its temperature more or less constant or even lower it, due to unknown complicated mechanisms inside ... but on a more general level the principles of thermodynamics would lead one to expect tadah, yes .. the temperature to increase.