i just want to point something out about what mmt advocates and other broadly new left, keynesian type economic advocates don't argue for in order to clarify a point.

keynesians have a reputation for supporting "tax and spend" economic positions, which are supposed to be opposed by free market advocates. so, what is this about mmt supporting the abolition of taxes? it's a caricature created by this army of zombie followers that mmt has developed, because they think it gives them an academic argument to just let the printing press run forever. i don't have this research, but i'd strongly suspect that your average mmt cheerleader is somebody who spent a large amount of their childhood being told that they can't have things due to the existence of artificial financial restraints imposed by parents who thought they were teaching them "values". i'm not talking about poor kids. i'm talking about parents that had means and denied it to their kids in order to "build character". this kind of parenting always fails. and, what happened to these kids? they became these mmt zombies, convinced that we can have everything in exchange for nothing...

if the government can create as much money as it wants, what do we need taxes for? and, yeah: mmt does make this argument, so long as it's at the federal level. but, it also argues that adjusting tax rates is a useful way to stimulate the economy, or to slow it down. i think the evidence does uphold this, but only on the condition that it is targeted. so, a policy of adjusting tax rates to stop or start the economy should be geared mostly at the middle class, not at the rich. this isn't a free market position, it's a realist position around the value of fiat money: yeah, we can just print it at will in order to pay for stuff. sure. so, if your concern is around spending, there's no reason at all to think you need to collect the money in order to spend it - and if your argument is that taxes need to be high in order to pay for spending, or that we cannot increase spending without increasing taxes, then that argument is invalid.

but, even that is not an argument for the total abolition of taxes. it is at best an argument for the abolition of federal taxes. while it is theoretically possible that the federal government could oversee all spending in the country, that it is not the way that any modern country works. existing, real-life countries mostly fund social services out of money that is taxed at the state/provincial or municipal level. mmt does not in any way advocate for the abolition of these taxes. in fact, the left has historically seen property taxes as one of the most progressive types of taxation.

the narrative that john mccain is senile is actually intended to protect him from more direct criticism. his intent was transparently to carry out a bait and switch, to make it seem like comey is biased towards the democrats and that the investigation consequently carries no value. now, it may be the case that mccain has lost a few steps, sure; if you are informed, you need to do some mental gymnastics, sure, but if you're not informed, or perhaps don't know much about the process, you could conceivably be confused by the obfuscation. the thing is that this is so transparent relative to the reality that it exposes mccain as hopelessly and unworkably dishonest. so, you should not give him a pass on this - you should call him out for his malicious level of dishonesty, rather than pretend he doesn't know what he's doing.