Job Guarantee and Unemployment
An important part of MMT is the idea of a Job Guarantee. Simply put, the idea is to ensure that anyone that wants a job can find one. In other words, the unemployment rate would be very close to 0%, instead of the fictitious "full employment" artificially determined to whatever rate suits the mainstream narrative. An unemployment rate of 5% is thereby deemed to be "full" employment if the RBA decides that is the number of people that need to be unemployed in order to keep inflation at some other arbitrary level. This is called the NAIRU - Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment, and it is a made up number which changes often.
MMT explains why that approach is nonsensical. I won't go into the details here because it is covered elsewhere.
This is an interview with one of the MMT founders, Australian Professor Bill Mitchell, explaining the MMT approach to unemployment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSw0ROvM6QM
Here is Prof Mitchell's blog post on the NAIRU:
https://billmitchell.org/blog/?p=26163
Prof Pavlina Tcherneva explains the Job Guarantee:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56caAUMyRAs
Prof Randall L. Wray explains the NAIRU - a policy to create unemployment which is the corner-stone of the RBA's interest rate policy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suVHkDJ0Jw4
A short note on the RBA, interest rates and unemployment
Basically, the RBA raises interest rates so that someone with a mortgage (might be you) reduces their spending which leads to a business downturn which causes workers to lose their job (might be you) in order to increase insecurity and reduce demand for workers and other goods and services, thus (theoretically) bringing down inflation by reducing demand. It is cruel and imprecise, as we have seen in Australia since 2023, for example.
Here is Prof Randall L. Wray explaining why it is imprecise:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E464oOQ6Tw
And from the Australia Institute: