This is Planet Money from NPR.

When you scroll down in President Joe Biden's stimulus package and you look at all the bullet

points, there is money for so many things.

More money for unemployment, more money for state and local governments, money to help

schools open, money to bail out state and local governments.

There is a lot in there.

And the total price tag is $1.9 trillion.

And this is at a time when a federal government is already spending trillions more dollars a

year than it is taking in in taxes.

Federal debt is already more than $20 trillion.

So this raises the question, how is the government going to pay for it?

But there is a school of thought that says, wrong question, wrong way to think about it.

This wing of economics calls itself modern monetary theory, MMT.

We covered it two years ago, back when other presidential candidates were suggesting other

expensive programs like Medicare for all, free college and a jobs guarantee.

And those didn't happen, but with spending shooting up this way of thinking about economics

was gaining some traction.

So with more spending on the horizon now, here is our episode from 2018 on modern monetary

theory.

We got a brilliant question on our Planet Money Twitter account recently.

A question that spawned this entire episode.

I asked my dad about a question and he said he couldn't answer it.

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