You better write me off as well septimus. Saying that open market operations reduce federal debt sounds pretty confused to me. Remember I jumped in this thread not recalling the MMT backstory. There’s a way of making the statement work, but you have to use non-standard definitions- which is ok. But if you’re going to define an ostrich as a type of common house plant, you have to make that clear up front.
Look: I don’t have a problem with skepticism about the effectiveness of monetary policy during a liquidity trap or advocacy of fiscal countercyclic policy. But you don’t need MMT to get there: textbook economics is fine. Not that I know anything about MMT. Admittedly, Mankiw provides pretty much the most skeptical presentation of counter-cyclic fiscal policy among major mainstream textbooks.
The only defense I’d give towards LinusK is that he was mangling intermediate college macroeconomics, which is forgivable. It’s not like we’re born with this knowledge. Hey, when I write about physics on this message board, I run into difficulties as well. Ditto for analytic philosophy. But I try at least to take a little care in those threads, with only partial success.