Bill Mitchell & Luke McGregor discuss MMT in the media & why, contrary to what we’re led to believe, the government can never ‘go broke’.

Thurs 8 July 2021  7:00 PM AEST

This is a Zoom webinar. We’d sold out. But Zoom have given us a whole lot of bonus tickets. So you can still book:

We also LiveStream on YouTube, so if you prefer, you can just watch on YouTube. Here’s the link:

https://youtu.be/uiDZR3mrHe4

Just copy and paste it into your YouTube app or your browser.

The advantage to participating via Zoom is that your can pose a question and appear live during the question time at the end of the session.

In households across Australia we see a startling increase in the incidence of ‘shouting-at-the-telly’. Experts say there’s a strong correlation between ‘shouting-at-the-telly’ and the rise in the understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). Monitoring the hoarse throats of “telly-shouters” experts note that the telly is brim full of talking heads fear-mongering about ‘tax-payer money’, ‘the debt burden on future generations’ and ‘the government going broke’. Very concerning.

But seriously, a free and independent media is a bulwark of a healthy, functioning democracy. Increasing attention is being paid to MMT in the media, particularly since the onset of this Covid era. Yet questions about media ‘group think’ and independence are being brought to the fore by a stubborn bias towards the false, orthodox, neoliberal economic narrative of ‘sound finance’ and fiscal austerity. A bias that is to the detriment (and ire) of us all.

Our guest, Luke McGregor, actor and writer on the highly acclaimed comedy Rosehaven, and comedian well-known on the stand-up circuit, has fortunately become a champion of MMT in the media. His Lukenomics segment, ‘Will Australia Ever Run Out of Money?’ on Charlie Pickering’s The Weekly and his recent appearance on ABC’s Q&A program being wonderful examples of his efforts.

In this webinar, Luke McGregor and Professor Bill Mitchell, founding MMT scholar, economist, academic, author, prolific blogger and founder of MMTeD, will have a conversation about all things MMT, their experience in the media and how we might best take charge of the media narrative.