When director Maren Poitras and executive producer Marc Smolowitz sat down with the Chronicle for a video interview about “Finding the Money,” their new documentary on the U.S. monetary system, the federal government had just averted a shutdown and Representative Kevin McCarthy had lost his job as Speaker of the House.

这意味着政府工作人员和任何依赖on the federal government would still receive their checks, National Parks would remain open, and San Francisco Fleet Week would commence. However, Congress had only approved funding for 45 days — a kind of stay of execution before the fight over government funding and the national debt commences again.

“The debt ceiling will be back in the news,” said Poitras, who lives in Richmond. “And then we’re going into a presidential election cycle, where proposals like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, education, Social Security — all of these things relate to government spending.”

Poitras added that two juxtapositions often arise here between what we can afford as a society and what the federal government can afford. “The question we often hear is, ‘Oh, you want to do something ambitious, like tackle climate change. Well, where are you going to find the money? How are you going to pay for it? What about the size of the national debt? ’”

“Finding the Money,” which closes this year’s Green Film Festival of San Francisco on Thursday, Oct. 19, offers tantalizing answers to these questions. The subject of the documentary is modern monetary theory, also known as MMT, which posits governments like the United States that print and control their currency cannot go broke or become insolvent and can, in fact, produce as much money needed to spend, constrained only by the availability of resources. The “national debt,” according to this theory, is money that the government pumped into the economy without taxing it back.

The main proponent of MMT in “Finding the Money” is Stephanie Kelton, professor of economics and public policy at New York’s Stony Brook University. She was an adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders on his 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns, formerly served as a U.S. Senate Budget Committee chief economist, and is the author of the 2020 book, “The Deficit Myth.” Surrounding her in the film are other proponents of the theory but also economists, both conservative and liberal, who disagree with Kelton’s conclusions. They insist deficits do matter, although some struggle to articulate why.

“I interviewed so many economists of all stripes to figure out, ‘What’s their critique? ’” Poitras said. “I could never get much past the platitudes of, ‘MMT is this crazy theory that just says you can print infinite amounts of money and it will never cause inflation.’ That’s the kind of characterization or mischaracterization that’s out there … What I find illuminating is that I couldn’t find a great critique.”

旧金山生产商Smolowitz补充说me people don’t understand what the MMT economists are saying and are so entrenched in their ideologies that there is no wavering from them.

“When it comes to this debate, they hold so hard and fast to these ideologies about what we can afford and the debt. Then when we were working on this film during the pandemic, there was a huge change of perspective, an urgent need to take care of people in society,” Smolowitz said.

There was money for COVID relief spending that helped people stay at home, not work, and take care of themselves, he said, “and now with the Inflation Reduction Act, there is starting to be a sort of gradual opening and openness to these (MMT) ideas.

“They’re noticing, ‘OK, yes, there’s inflation, but there are ways to keep it in check.’”

Poitras came to “Finding the Money” from an environmental background and sees in the obsession with deficits a stumbling block to solving the existential threat of climate change. The government insists it lacks the money to fight it, relying on private sector solutions. But she argues in the film that solving such a massive global challenge is the work of governments, not corporations — and MMT is just one way to approach funding these projects.

“We see what we can do as a society when we decide to mobilize. Look at what we did with World War II, the Manhattan Project, and the moon shot,” Poitras said. “We can see what we can do very rapidly when we put resources behind collective goals.”

This story tries to flip the statement of not having enough money and asks: How can the U.S. economy provide for the basic needs of its people?

“We could have better social services. We could have public transportation and healthcare and education, and all these things without necessarily the GDP growing or carbon emissions growing,” Poitras said. “This money piece, I think, is really the missing piece in the entire environmental movement.”

Pam Grady is a freelance writer.