MixedThe Wall Street JournalMs. Kelton, a professor of economics at Stony Brook University and senior economic adviser to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign, starts with a few correct observations. But when the implications don’t lead to her desired conclusions, her logic, facts and language turn into pretzels ... How much does this add up to? $20 trillion? $50 trillion? She offers no numbers. How is it vaguely plausible that the U.S. has this much productive capacity lying around going to waste? In a book about money, the inflation of the 1970s and its defeat are astonishingly absent ... By weight, however, most of the book is not about monetary theory. It’s rather a recitation of every perceived problem in America ... Much of The Deficit Myth is a memoir of Ms. Kelton’s conversion to MMT beliefs and of her time in the hallways of power ... Ms. Kelton does not grapple with the vast and deep economic thinking since the 1940s on money, inflation, debts, stimulus and slack measurement. Each item on Ms. Kelton’s well-worn spending wish list has raised many obvious objections. She mentions none. Skeptics have called it \'magical monetary theory.\' They’re right.
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