Hello, listeners, it's Pete Davis here.

We've got a great bonus episode for you today.

It's on what I believe is one of the biggest waves that is about to hit politics in America.

Modern Monetary Theory.

For those of you who don't know, the modern monetary theory, or MMT community,

is a ragtag band of economists, politicians, and activists who are arguing that the way people

in power think about money, government spending, and deficits is all wrong. And their alternative

way of seeing money has revolutionary consequences.

I have two big MMTers on the show today. I'm going to interview them to explain MMT from the

ground up. But before I bring them on, I want to give a quick primer on MMT so you are oriented to what the heck

they are talking about and why it really, really matters. Here we go. The standard way to think

about government spending is that the government taxes people. Those people send their money to the

government and then the government spends the

money. The standard way to think about deficits is that when the government spends more than it takes

in in tax revenue, you have a deficit, and deficits are bad. If you don't eventually pay down

the debt caused by this deficit by cutting spending or raising taxes,

you run the risk of a government default on its debt, or the terror of inflation, prices

skyrocketing and money losing value.

But here's what the MMTers say.

This standard model of thinking about money, government, and spending only applies

to governments that don't print their own money. So state governments, local governments,

governments like Greece who use the euro, when you have a government that does print its own

...