It's really hard to do that in the general case. As the aphorism goes, "Show me your budgets and I'll show you your priorities", and in a democratic society, the priorities are supposed to be decided by the voters.

You could however envision a system where the bottom-line (the overall budget surplus or deficit) is dictated algorithmically by economic conditions, with the government free to move funds between different priorities, raise taxes, or cut overall spending as long as they met the target budget surplus. Actually wouldn't be a bad idea; it mimics how private organizations and households have to adjust their spending to fit constraints. The whole idea of algorithmic central banking and algorithmic fiscal policy could be quite interesting, particularly now that you have cryptocurrency where you can build algorithms into the nature of money itself.

I think it's worth looking at what was actually asked. From your article, they were asked these two questions:

> Countries that borrow in their own currency should not worry about government deficits because they can always create money to finance their debt

> Countries that borrow in their own currency can finance as much real government spending as they want by creating money.

MMT is quite clear about limiting factors that make those two statements false, yet the article frames them as "the basic aspects of MMT". To me, those questions feel intentionally malicious and even if not, the survey is certainly meaningless as to the opinions of economists on what MMT actually describes.

The parent comment isn't saying MMT is true or false. They are just saying MMT is a theory of how the economy operates (descriptive). _If_ you take it as true then here are things you can do (prescriptive).

It's sort of like saying something like the water-sky color theory is descriptive not prescriptive. The theory is that the sky is blue because water is blue and light reflects that color back into the sky. There is no behavioral prescription just a description of how one influences the other. If you want to change the color of the sky change the color of the oceans. That part would be prescriptive. This says nothing of whether the theory is well-founded or how many scientist agree with it.

Parent is saying MMT simply lays out a theory of how a (our) economy currently operates, not whether it's good or bad. People who adhere to the theory would then derive their policy prescriptions based on it being true and (crucially) their desired economic/political/social outcomes.

But there's a time mismatch, at least at typical government action timeframes. Quarterly inflation looks high, meaning people are already out of pocket. Tax goes up at the same price levels, making people more out of pocket. Inflation reduces, hopefully, but that doesn't mean prices go down - people remain out of pocket. Then, you hope, wages catch up, but that whole cycle can easily take a year.

Elections are on average 2-3 years away. Midterms in USofA 1 year away.

> In addition, an economic theory can only be useful if the actions that they dictate can actually be put into practice; if nobody's going to follow what the theory tells you to do, then it's of little use at all.

That is not a requirement for a theory to be useful. The fact that not using it has a cost is proof of its utility.

Remote working itself isn't inflationary, but transitioning from office to remote is. Remote workers can get high paying jobs in low cost of living areas and can generally job hop with less friction so salaries rise, spending that would have gone to commuting expenses and daytime childcare is now disposable income, people spending more of their time at home causes them to invest in larger or nicer homes. More money getting thrown at fewer items causes prices to rise.

I don’t think it is.

In fact, all else being equal, switching to work from home should be deflationary.

You spend less on gas, less on eating out, less on movement and activity in general…

The transition to work from home may very well be inflationary… But the end result seems quite obviously deflationary to me.