system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
If a fundamental point of MMT is that countries can print money to meet the demand for spending, why are taxes going up?

It's been many years since I studied economics in college, and apparently things have changed a lot since the Austrian school was the vogue.

Modern Monetary Theory, honestly, confuses the hell out of me.  The way it was pitched to me, is that governments can simply print money if they need to spend money without actually having the money.  Because of the way "modern economies" work (whatever that means), the increased production of money wouldn't greatly impact inflation rates.

So then my question is, if MMT holds true, and the purpose of taxation is to fund government programs, why are we still getting taxed?  Hell, why are taxes going up?  If we can supplement the government's budget by just printing the difference in the budget, shouldn't we see tax cuts?
gpt
MMT is pseudoscience. Everything it says is consistent with mainstream economics, it misleads by what it *doesn't* say. In a way that makes it very hard to believe they're doing so innocently. 

In the case of spending, what the government really needs is real resources. For example if the government is building a road it needs things like gravel, bulldozers, construction engineers' time, etc. There are excellent reasons why governments generally obtain such resources via taxation rather than direct requisition. But at the heart, real resources must change ownership. We talk about government budgets in terms of money because it's impractical to talk about all the different goods and services needed.