a job guarantee would necessitate taxation.

This reframing raises the question: does a Job Guarantee require higher taxation? The answer, using MMT reasoning, is “Almost certainly, yes”. Suppose the economy initially has two groups of workers, employed and unemployed. Employed workers produce some quantity of marketed goods and services, as well as freely provided public services. They receive a wage, while unemployed workers get a (low) benefit. As well as workers, there are people receiving profits, interest and so on. Now we introduce a Job Guarantee in which all unemployed workers are hired, at the minimum wage or more, to produce public services (say, extra contact tracing for pandemics), that would otherwise not be provided. The newly employed workers spend their wages (over and above previous benefits) on marketed goods and services. But where are these goods and services to come from? It can only be from reducing the consumption of those who are already receiving wages or other market incomes. Shifting the consumption to public use is the job of taxation (alternatively, the government could cut existing services, freeing the workers there to produce market goods and services, but I won’t explore this).