Inflation is core to MMT

This is a quick summary because you can study this in the other material.

All branches of economics say that inflation is a bad thing. MMT puts it front and centre of the policy implications of government spending.

Critics of MMT say that MMT says that governments can spend without constraint (the "drunken sailor" metaphor). No MMT economist says that. Only the people who do not understand MMT say that.

MMT says that before the government spends it must think about whether the things it is about to purchase are available to be purchased. If there was close to zero unemployment, there are no spare workers to "buy". So if they do spend money to employ more workers they will bid up the price of labour. But if there are spare workers, supply is greater than demand, so the price will not rise.

This is the same for physical resources like timber. e.g. If the government spends money to encourage more home building to address a shortage, but a bushfire (and/or COVID19) has reduced the supply of timber, then the spending will create timber inflation and home building costs will rise - i.e. be inflationary.

So, for MMT this is the (simplified) process: The government thinks it should spend money to get outcome X, but it needs to check which resources are necessary to get outcome X, and if they do not exist they need to so something to make them available before they spend that money.

For mainstream economics the idea is that they spend the money and if it creates inflation they raise interest rates to cause unemployment to reduce demand to reduce inflation (even if the inflation was not caused by wage growth).

Which approach makes more sense and causes less suffering, do you think?

See also the comment at the bottom of https://aboutmmt.au/job-guarantee.