Is the Job Guarantee a Ponzi Scheme?

“The basic idea is that the government can’t run out of money. It creates money just by spending.” -- Stephanie Kelton

This is true. Government cannot run out of its own money. But what is money? It is a token or pledge that can be redeemed for something of value. If government creates much more money than there are things of value to redeem it for the prices of those things go up. Not to worry, Zach Carter assures us:

But even inflation doesn’t impose a hard limit on policy options. The Federal Reserve can raise interest rates to deal with it, Congress can raise taxes to pull money out of circulation or even impose price controls.

Hyman Minsky expanded on this explanation in his financial instability hypothesis:

The first theorem of the financial instability hypothesis is that the economy has financing regimes under which it is stable, and financing regimes in which it is unstable. The second theorem of the financial instability hypothesis is that over periods of prolonged prosperity, the economy transits from financial relations that make for a stable system to financial relations that make for an unstable system.

In particular, over a protracted period of good times, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by hedge finance units to a structure in which there is large weight to units engaged in speculative and Ponzi finance. Furthermore, if an economy with a sizable body of speculative financial units is in an inflationary state, and the authorities attempt to exorcise inflation by monetary constraint, then speculative units will become Ponzi units and the net worth of previously Ponzi units will quickly evaporate. Consequently, units with cash flow shortfalls will be forced to try to make position by selling out position. This is likely to lead to a collapse of asset values. 

The financial instability hypothesis is a model of a capitalist economy which does not rely upon exogenous shocks to generate business cycles of varying severity. The hypothesis holds that business cycles of history are compounded out of (i) the internal dynamics of capitalist economies, and (ii) the system of interventions and regulations that are designed to keep the economy operating within reasonable bounds.

See? If "the authorities" decide to "exorcise [the demon of] inflation" through taxation or higher interest rates, it won't be the government that goes belly up. It can't run out of money. It will just be those speculative and Ponzi units whose net worth will evaporate. No problem!

It remains a mystery to me why job guarantee proponents point to Minsky as the patron saint of the job guarantee idea. It was, after all, Leon Keyserling who drafted the Full Employment Act of 1946, The Freedom Budget (1966) and job guarantee provisions of Humphrey-Hawkins (1976). Good old "siphoning off the increment to pay for the excrement" NSC-68 Leon. 

Mr. Keyserling was a big fan of spending that "paid for itself" by augmenting growth in the gross national product. His 1966 Freedom Budget was also touted as being financed through an "economic growth dividend." The idea was that economic growth of five percent over a ten year period would generate the revenue to pay for the program.

If it wasn't the government doing it, the method of financing that Keyserling advocated would be a Ponzi scheme because it relied on revenues that would presumably arise solely from disbursements and not from the sales of value-added goods or services. Fortunately, a government cannot operate a Ponzi scheme because "it creates money just by spending."

So, technically speaking, a job guarantee is not a Ponzi scheme. It's only a wee bit Ponzyish.