I have read Murphy's blog (I read it every day), growstuff. The one you're referring to was very depressing. This obsession with debt is absurd. For a start, the goveernment owes a great deal of it to itself, as that is what QE was essentially. A great deal of the rest of it are peoples' savings; bonds and gilts held by pension funds or individuals and money people put into National Savings accounts. With interest rates so low the cost to the government is negligible and it is particularly valuable to the people and institutions which have money invested in them as they are assured that they will get back their principal, even if slightly eroded by inflation. Unlike investing in shares which, famously, can go down as well as up in value and may have no value at all if the company goes bust.
Raising taxes just returns money to the treasury and leaves people with less to spend in the economy. It has no logic to it.
We bang on about a country's economy not being like a household economy, with a finite amount of money available. Perhaps it should also be made clear that a country isn't a business, either, and doesn't have to make a profit or even 'balance its budget' when it has the power to issue as much money as it needs.
Murphy always said that Labour under Corbyn didn't 'quite' get it in relation to MMT and government debt, but at least it was going in the right direction with its plans to invest in the real economy.
