I'm enjoying this article, and nodding my head in general, but that is not what MMT says, and clearly the evidence of history shows that printing money has been disastrous on *some* occasions.

If the US government for some reason created ten new dollars for every dollar that existed, it would obviously be catastrophic. Your statement as written cannot be true.

What MMT says, I am fairly sure, is that there is no inflationary cost when the government creates a new dollar, as long as - key missing point!! - that dollar creates more than a dollar in new goods or services that would not have existed before.

This is a pretty radical idea, and I'm still not sure I 100% agree with it, but it's elegant and makes sense once you think about it.

What does this mean for UBI? Many studies show that injecting $1 into the economy at the lowest levels results in somewhere between $1.50 and $3 in new economic activity. So if MMT is correct, then "printing" money to create a UBI would not be inflationary.

Summary: if you say, "The government can print any amount of money it likes with no consequences", you're going to turn off skeptical people on all sides, because it's provably wrong.

If you say, "The government can print money as long as it results in more economic activity than the money it prints, and giving money to the poor definitely does that," it's more of a mouthful, but is actually something you can make a strong case for.

Thanks for a (so far) strong article!