Linking MMT with Keynes’s economic analysis/prescriptions betrays an unfortunate ignorance of both.

Taxation only takes money out of the economy if government is running a surplus; otherwise, that money is recirculated in the form of spending by government.

Government doesn’t print money. It sells debt to raise money. The central bank (the Federal Reserve System in the U.S.) is bound by law to ensure that all such debt issued by the central government will be bought. As part of that process, the central bank can have the Treasury Department print money for it to use to buy debt that the central government has issued.

It is important that the money that is thus created enters the economy in the form of debt, not ‘free money’. That debt requires interest to be paid to the central bank. All public debt creates a requirement for taxation, which is actual money taken from people and businesses, not merely figures written in accountants’ ledgers.

‘Quantitative easing’ (QE) was money printed by the Treasury on behalf of the central bank for it to give to the private sector in exchange for ‘assets’, most of them of the ‘toxic’ variety. The creation of that money did not involve debt. The central bank has been re-selling those some of those (presumably, non-toxic) assets, which has taken money out of circulation — though, since its profits are remitted to the Treasury Department, to the extent that those sales result in overall profits for the Fed that money does get spent, recirculated back into the economy, if the central government is not running a surplus.

And ‘round and ‘round we go.