The correct metric to discover and apply is total INDIVIDUAL incomes and total costs/prices SIMULTANEOUSLY CREATED, that is those two metrics as a moment to moment FLOW. Going to the cost accounting statistics which take one to the 3 and 4 dimensional, i.e. actual not abstract level of the economy, it becomes apparent that more costs as a moment to moment flow are being created by any and all enterprises not in bankruptcy….than individual incomes simultaneously produced. This is because besides the costs of Finance a business also has depreciation costs and a host of other incidental costs plus the inevitable cost of waste which it must pass on to consumers in order to survive. Anecdotally and individually enterprises can survive in such a system, but macro-economically it is a system rigged to be unstable and unnecessarily onerous. DSGE and even Keynesian theorists would say that orthodox Finance or government finance can resolve this instability. MMT is an excellent and further insight in that they recognize that sovereign governments indeed have no limit on their abilities to generate costless injections of money…but what all three theories do not recognize is that by injecting even costless money into the economy…the flow of a scarcity of total INDIVIDUAL incomes to total costs/prices is still re-initiated and persists and so also the most basic metric of monetary and economic instability above described. The only way to resolve and dispel that reality is to give the individual a DIRECT gift of income, a dividend to everyone 18 and over, and then, as the system ITSELF will still tend toward the above disequilibrium, a discount to retail consumer prices can be applied because it is both the terminal end of the productive process for any product or service and the sum of its total costs/price. Those discounts to consumers could then be rebated back to merchants so that policy would unobtrusively and seamlessly fit within a profit making system where macro policy extends all the way to the individual.

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The Dork of Cork:  The collected taxes in Ireland to the tune of 19 billion net is not spent nationally.
I would suggest that most of this money flows to London.
All european countries must act in a desperate manner to export so as to get enough money to survive.
This is strange but the UK has doubled it’s imports from the EU 28 since 2011……how could that be I wonder???????

These observations do not require cats in little boxes.

Me:  Dork,
Precisely. Exports are actually just the present necessity to attempt to garner enough individual income from other economies….to make up for the scarcity of such in the domestic one. Unfortunately that is a game of musical chairs. The only ways to remedy this are to begin exporting to the Moon or Mars, or make the domestic economy self liquidating by policies of a universal dividend and a discount to retail prices. I leave it to the forum to decide which is more practical.