Hi, I'm Dan Pramak and welcome to Axios Recap. Today's Wednesday, July 1st.

Pfizer's stock is up on promising vaccine data, July 4th travel is expected to be way down,

and we're wondering if the deficit even matters anymore.

How are you going to pay for it? That's one of the most popular questions in

presidential politics. Medicare for all? How are you going to pay for it? Student debt cancellation?

How are you going to pay for it? Fixing roads and bridges? How are you going to pay for it?

Even President Trump's most famous 2016 pledge to build a southern border

wall came with an explicit explanation of who'd pay for it, even if it never made much

sense. But what if you didn't have to pay for it? Any of it, ever. That's the basic premise

behind something called modern monetary theory. If Congress wants to spend money on something,

it should just do it without worrying about raising revenue or cutting spending on the other side.

Need to spend more money? Print more money. Now, that does sound a bit radical, but one of the leading

MMT advocates has become very influential in Democratic Party politics. Her name is Stephanie Kelton, and she was an economic advisor to Bernie Sanders

before recently moving over to a task force for the Biden campaign.

Now, Vice President Biden has not fully subscribed to MMT, and nor did Sanders for that matter.

But Kelton's involvement with Biden's campaign could give us a window into how he

would govern America's economy, were he to beat President Trump in November. In 15 seconds, we will

talk to Stephanie Kelton about her role in the Biden campaign and her belief that the bill

doesn't always come due. But first, this. We're joined now by Stephanie Kelton, who has a new book out titled

The Deficit Myth, Modern Monetary Theory, and the Birth of the People's Economy. That is not the

sort of title that would usually find its way onto the New York Times bestseller list,

but it did. Why do you think people are so interested in this right now?

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