The above video went viral recently. It shows one of Joe Biden’s top economic advisers, Jared Bernstein, trapped in a cage of on-camera ignorance when asked to explain why government borrows its own currency to pay bills. Confidence-inspiring comments like, “The government definitely lends… money by selling bonds. Uh, is that what they do?” and “Yeah, I guess I’m just, I can’t really… I don’t get it,” resulted in rare simultaneous left and right guffaws.

Conservatives chortled over Bernstein because it’s a Biden official looking like a douchebag. People on the left howled because they believe Bernstein to be writhing in a net of capitalist denial, unable to face the Great Truth, namely that a government that can print its own currency should never have to borrow. It can just print money!

The scene is from Finding the Money, a new documentary paean to Modern Monetary Theory, a pillar of new leftist thinking. MMT’s high priest is the star of Finding the Money, economist Stephanie Kelton, by all accounts a nice person and loaded to the gills with the currency of the day, certainty. Kelton is sure deficits are fake, part of an age-old political fraud that cons the public into believing national debt is the reason politicians don’t pay for social programs. When talking about MMT, Kelton transforms — I mean this as a compliment — into a master persuader in the tradition of Kashpirovsky or the Amazing Kreskin. If Marcia Clark possessed a fraction of Kelton’s self-assurance, O.J. would have died in prison.

Watch in this clip from the film as the penny drops for audience members as Kelton explains that if you turn the graph of government deficits upside down, the story changes. “Just as a six becomes a nine, when we view it from a different angle, a government deficit becomes a financial surplus,” she says. Not only are deficits not bad, they’re good, because every dollar the government owes is someone else’s asset. Therefore, we can change scary headlines about deficits into awesome ones about surpluses: