(10-05-2021, 04:59 PM)mikesez Wrote:

(10-05-2021, 03:47 PM)Lucky2Last Wrote: That's not true according to modern monetary theory. I'm still in the early phases of learning about it, but it's looking more and more like that's the theory being adopted by the fed. In that case, taxes are useful for creating equity and punishing political opponents.

MMT derives from Chartalism.
Chartalism explains that people adopt a government's currency if and only if that government is collecting taxes in that currency.
So even if you go down that road, you still have taxation as an essential function of government.  And the money collected is income to the government.   The big innovation of MMT is they are showing that the taxes don't need to be equal to the spending if the government has control over the creation of money.  However, the taxes still have to exist.  They can't be zero or else people will start to use something else as their main currency.

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(10-05-2021, 04:53 PM)flsprtsgod Wrote: To whom?

At this point you'd worry about BitCoin, DogeCoin, etc.

Regarding the part in bold, the government doesn't have that.  It comes from "the fed" which is not a government entity.

Also "printing more dollars" does not "create more money".  All it does is put more dollars into circulation.  A VERY simple explanation of it is this.  If a widget costs $1 it's because that $1 is only one of say a million in circulation.  So suppose the government "creates" another million dollars and puts it into circulation, that $1 widget is now worth $2 because the amount of money available has doubled.

Also, taxes are supposed to fund "essential" operations.  Much of what tax money goes toward isn't "essential" for the operation of the government at all levels (federal, state or local).

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