There’s a topical version of the aff consistent with MMT---even if taxes don’t directly fund spending, they can be used to directly redistribute income

It is fair to say that MMT authors tend not to emphasise the potential detrimental effects of high interest payments. As a result of political choices, real resources could de facto be diverted from low-income taxpayers, on whom the general taxation system relies disproportionally in developed countries, to high-income domestic or foreign savers. Of course, this also depends ultimately on who are the holders of government bonds. Yet regressive redistributive effects cannot be ruled out, when these holders are predominantly the representatives of the most affluent portions of the population. Even if one holds the MMT assumption that government expenditure is not funded by taxes, taxes are still used to drain real resources from the private sector: when a citizen pays taxes, the individual relinquishes purchasing power and gives it to the government. Interest payments on government debt correspond to a transfer of this purchasing power to individuals. Again, this could come with bottom-up redistributive effects. It makes a lot of difference whether public money is used to provide public goods (for example, to build schools or hospitals) or to pay interest on government bonds to a specific portion of the domestic or foreign population.