I give this 4 stars because it was pretty readable and I get the idea. Like other nonfiction books I’ve read recently, it felt like it went on a little long, repeated itself, etc. There’s a tendency for personal anecdotes to show up, I guess to try to make things more interesting, but it often feels more like the author trying to showcase their importance when the story doesn’t really add anything.

My takeaways are (with no sense of the strength of the claims cause I’m not that smart):

1. MMT recognizes that a nation with currency sovereignty doesn’t need to worry about a deficit. There’s always more money.
2. The real concern is inflation. You do not have a blank check. You have limited resources (human and otherwise), that need to be taken into account.
3. Congress should manage fiscal policy with inflation in mind, not the deficit. The budget should be deficit agnostic. It should be whatever it needs to be to balance the economy.
4. Sort of tangentially, the author pushes the idea of a federal job guarantee as an alternative to unemployment benefits. These would be jobs related to public works and care. I have so many questions about that idea that she doesn’t answer.