Covid MMT

One of the lessons learned from Covid was the sending of government checks to people for whom the government told them not go to work. This made the idea of a government check more amenable to many saying it was not that people didn't want to work but that the government forbid them to work and thus it is OK to sent a government check. This came at a time when modern monetary theory (MMT) was just coming into the main stream of economic theory. The basis of MMT can best be understood with a simple example. There are two buckets, one is government and the other is all else. The government spends $100 so we remove $100 from the government bucket and add $100 to the all else bucket. The government then collects $90 in taxes and thus ends up with a $10 deficit. Under our normal way of looking at economics things end there but the all else bucket now has a $10 surplus and that belongs to us. The more the government goes into debt the more surplus the people have. If people are looking for jobs the government can supply those jobs and pay the people by going further in debt while adding more surplus to the peoples account. This works until full employment is reached at which time the government can no longer spend because it would cause wage/price inflation. Under normal economics the fed controls inflation by adjusting interest rates but MMT does so by adjusting government spending.