Guest Post: Stephanie Kelton Introduces A New Candidate For Congress

Stephanie Kelton has been eager to introduce an acquaintance of hers, Justin Santopietro, who is running for the Democratic nomination for Congress in the rural, Appalachian district of VA-09. She had introduced me to Justin a couple of months ago and, among other things, I asked him how he would handle being smeared by Republicans as a puppet of Nancy Pelosi. At the time he told me that "The right wingers' attempts to smear all Democratic challengers as 'Pelosi Puppets' is even more laughable in rural districts like mine, where the national party has no presence whatsoever. All the professional politicos and consultants in Washington think of politics now as purely a numbers game, so they rarely if ever commit resources to areas that have 'gone red' in recent years. Even though a Democrat has represented my district for 35 out of the last 50 years, the numbers crunchers at the top of the party consider areas like mine unwinnable. In the end, this may turn out to be more of a blessing than a curse, since the national party has proven time and again that they don't know how to persuade or motivate voters in rural areas. Thankfully, the local Democratic organizations are in many ways the exact opposite; while they often lack in human and financial resources, they actually live and pray among rural people, and know that they can in fact be persuaded to back populist-style Democrats-- if only the national party would let them. And now that congressional Republicans have giddily exposed themselves as right-wing servants of the uber-wealthy, populist bread and butter economic campaigns can be extremely effective in working class districts like the fightin' 9th."


An Experienced MMTer Is Running For Congress In 2018
-by Stephanie Kelton

Justin and I first started corresponding over email when he was still an undergraduate student at the George Washington University. Like many other people, Justin came across my New Economic Perspectives blog in the period following the financial crisis. He was looking for solid, empirical explanations for the economic chaos of the previous years.

When the Democrats lost control of the Senate in 2014, Sen. Bernie Sanders became the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, and he asked me to join him as the committee’s ranking chief economist. I accepted Bernie’s offer and moved to Washington a few weeks later. I met Justin in person for the first time over tapas in Jose Andres’ restaurant in DC’s Chinatown neighborhood. At the time he was working in the Legislative and Regulatory Affairs team at the Credit Union National Association (CUNA). While his professional work didn’t touch on what we now call “MMT,” he was actively writing his personal blog called All Wonks of Life, which took an MMT point of view towards fiscal and banking issues.

After I left Washington in 2016, I began planning the first International Conference on Modern Money Theory, which was held at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Justin participated on one of the conference panels, giving a paper on “Reforming the Federal Budget Process.” It was at this conference that Justin informed me that he was going to run for Congress in his home district of VA-09.

I’m supporting Justin’s bid for Congress because he is one of the few congressional candidates anywhere in the country who understands modern money and has applied it to his platform. As a mutual friend of ours, Geoff Coventry, wrote in a recent post here, the widespread misunderstanding of financial realities prevents a tremendous amount of good policy ideas from becoming reality. The “how do we pay for it” question is a killer for progressives, and unfortunately, not enough candidates know how to answer it. Thankfully, Justin is one candidate who can answer it from an MMT perspective, and he has used this confidence to put together a bold and detailed platform.

While VA-09 has become less Democratic over the past few years and went Bigly for Trump, it has been represented in Congress by a Democrat for 35 of the last 50 years-- and it can be again. I believe that an old-school populist Democrat like Justin is exactly the candidate that can win back many rural, blue collar voters. He’s told me that people around his rural district have been especially receptive to his Medicare-for-all plan, especially since Virginia did accept the Medicaid expansion.

The incumbent, Congressman Morgan Griffith, swept out popular, 14 term Democrat Rick Boucher in the 2010 Tea Party wave. Although Griffith cruised to re-election the past 3 times, there is now an unprecedented groundswell of anti-establishment sentiment in the district. This momentum, combined with Griffith’s far-right voting record and poor name recognition, make this a winnable race for the right kind of candidate in November. Justin has told me that he’s heard from dozens of Republican Trump voters who are very disappointed in Griffith and are ready to replace him. I believe that Justin’s economic and policy expertise, together with his experience in and around Washington, make him the prime candidate to do just that.