It's unlikely that this politician explicitly believes in MMT, but the belief that you can somehow wish debt away in in-line with MMT. And of course, any philosophy exists within the zeitgeist of the times. After the GFC, a lot of people in the world started to believe that money is somehow imaginary.
> the belief that you can somehow wish debt away in in-line with MMT
The belief that you can wish debt away is rooted in the Keynesianism/Reaganomics of the past five decades. MMT basically just accepts the realpolitik that the enormous handouts to the financial industry will never be stopped, and says that we might as well use some of the new money deliberately. From my economically conservative Austrian perspective, at least MMT appears intellectually honest. MMT also corrects/shortens the feedback path from monetary creation to price inflation, rather than relying on the roundabout feedback path that has created this ever-growing asset bubble.
It would be more appropriate to say that Keynesians understand the system well enough to say that it is impossible to get rid of debt without negative interest rates so the only way out is to have slow burning inflation and the most effective way to generate inflation is not via the central bank but by government spending.
I advocate replacing slow burning inflation with negative interest on cash. When that is done, debts can be repaid.
