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It's a special Weekender a day early since it's Jared's 40th birthday! Jared and Nick discuss the precipice the country is on with its finances, who is to blame, and why it's such a political football. Plus the outrage over Lee Greenwood being taken off the National Council On The Arts (Womp Womp).
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That is the sound of the Weekender coming early, Nick.
It's always the weekend somewhere in the world, right?
It's always the weekend somewhere.
Hey everybody, I'm Jared Yates-Hexton.
I'm here at Nick Hausman.
You might notice that you are getting the weekend or a day early.
To go ahead and let you know what's going on, I am celebrating my 40th birthday today as you're hearing this.
Yes, happy birthday.
It's a big day.
It's a big, weird day.
So we're recording this on Wednesday, which means that you are now going to be listening to this on Thursday.
If for whatever reason you prefer it on Friday, listen to it on Friday.
Yeah.
Yes.
It's not going to hurt anybody.
I can remember my 40th.
What'd you do?
I actually had a kind of a big party and we had a Beatles impersonation band play and then I got to actually get up there and play the solo from Let It Be.
It was very exciting.
That's kind of Epic.
That's kind of amazing.
I'm not doing that.
Oh, well, you know, yeah, we all dressed up like the 60s and that was also interesting because I said, let's dress up like, um, I think I was, oh, you know what?
I don't think I was specific.
So when I said 60s, we got the whole range from like early 60s until, you know, through the counterculture stuff.
It was pretty, pretty interesting.
Wow.
I'm not doing that, but, um, wow.
So we're recording this early.
Uh, and and we're gonna have a conversation later.
We actually, um, we started getting ready to record this and we realized off mic, off the recording, that Nick and I Have a very, very serious difference in terms of what we prefer in terms of cake.
So we're going to get into that later.
We're going to save that for the later half of the show, because we have things of import to talk about.
For those who are not following this entire situation with the debt ceiling, Maybe you've tuned it out, because it is infuriating, and awful, and literally the embodiment of everything that's going wrong with American politics at the moment.
The debt ceiling is getting ready to expire, and if somebody doesn't do something about it, Nick, the entire American economy, and possibly the global economy, our lives, the lives of the people that we care about, are going to fall apart.
So, yeah, just that.
Just that.
You know, we go through this all the time, and you might have to remind me, I know during the Trump administration, at some point during the pod, whatever it was, they funded stuff that was like, the next time we ever hear that the government is out of money, just tell them to go fuck themselves.
Yeah, it's a fake fugazi of a thing.
This is not a real thing that actually exists because the debt doesn't mean anything.
Whether we have money or it doesn't mean anything, they just print money anyway.
It's all like a game we're playing and it gives the Republicans, of all people, this weird opportunity to like have some sort of principle that kind of mirrors the whole anti-mask thing to anti-vaccine stuff too.
And so it's like, oh wait, we can get in the way of something?
Great!
Let's do that.
It doesn't matter what it is they're talking about.
And that's what we're seeing with these assholes.
Yeah, so just to go ahead and reset this and let people know what's at stake here.
The debt ceiling is sort of a strange phenomenon that we created.
We just made up completely out of thin air, like everything else, but this in particular is, it's now become basically the doomsday machine of Dr. Strangelove.
It's this thing that we've created where after we go beyond a certain amount of debt, we then have to vote to pay that debt.
Basically, it's to hold everybody quote-unquote accountable, although that's not what it did.
The last time I checked, the debt that we're now voting on paying was racked up by one President Donald John Trump, and that was to the tune of $7.8 Trillion dollars, which was enabled by... Nick, can you check the notes on that?
What party ran up that debt?
Yeah, you know, the red one.
The red one, the Republican Party, because they decided that what was important was giving tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires and corporations.
Oh, they paid for themselves, Jared!
They paid for themselves, didn't they?
I was told they paid for themselves.
No, they did nothing.
As a matter of fact, they just absolutely injured the economy, hampered society, hurt human beings, and just expanded the chasm of inequality.
So now this vote, which should be a matter of symbolism, has now been turned into a weaponized moment.
I mean, I'm not going to be a complete asshole about it, but I'm going to make them take some tough votes.
as I read it.
I didn't want to read it to you off the microphone.
This is from Lindsey Graham.
Quote, unquote.
I mean, I'm not going to be a complete asshole about it, but I'm going to make them take some tough votes.
Well, guess what, Lindsey Graham?
You're being an asshole.
And all of them are being an asshole.
And literally what they are tinkering around with right now is melting down the American economy and possibly the world economy.
Just basically playing a game of Russian roulette that doesn't matter to anybody or anything except for everybody and everything.
Well, just to tweak the definition of what the debt ceiling is or what we have to do with it is, it's not necessarily that we have to pay the money we've already spent.
They just simply need to raise the amount that we're legally allowed to owe.
- Legally, quote unquote, legally. - Right, so if Congress says you can't owe more than $28 trillion, well then we need to pass a law that says, oh, we can actually owe 29 trillion, so then we can continue spending all this ridiculous, this nonexistent money.
So you kick the can down the road, and then what's worse about this is that it's almost like the never ending cycle of the economy itself, which is destined to crash and rise and crash and rise.
They never solve this issue.
They simply kick the can down the road for a month or a few months or maybe a year.
That's all we're talking about now.
By the way, the Republicans sound like they might be willing to just add another month or so to this so we can do it all over again in another month.
And they're probably trying to get it closer to where they can time it so it's politically expedient for them versus You know, actually solving this issue to some degree where we can function as a government.
But it's a number.
You know, there's the 14th Amendment that says that the, you know, the validity of the U.S.
debt shall not be questioned.
So in some respects, like, you can't let this happen.
And if it does happen, like, it almost doesn't matter.
It's all, like, it's all semantics.
It's all archaic.
that don't make sense anymore in this day and age.
And I honestly feel like it's almost like when we had the millennium and the clocks and all that, so we were all afraid that we were gonna have doomsday.
It kind of feels like that's what would happen too, even if they didn't raise it again. - Well, so immediate effects would be that people who rely on government assistance would be cut off immediately, right?
And by the way, the Pentagon now has weighed in on this, and I love it whenever the Pentagon releases a statement because they can't help but tell the truth.
There's no way for them to talk about anything without admitting the entire game, which is, the statement was like, having this entire thing go down would really affect our operations and also affect our payments to our contractors.
It's like, don't don't worry about the contractors.
We got to make sure that those motherfuckers get paid.
Which, by the way, the last time that the government passed a budget, let me see, how much did we decide to give defense?
$715 billion.
Guess who stood in the way of that?
Nobody.
Nobody stood in the way of that.
Why?
Because you just hand that money over.
Just shovel it over.
Go and buy 15 aircraft carriers.
You know what?
Go crazy.
Buy 16.
Who cares?
But meanwhile, we're worried about paying these contractors.
We're not talking about the people who are living paycheck to paycheck, depending upon federal support.
We're not talking about retired people who basically are going to have to scrounge for food and go without their medicine.
And then on top of it, the United States of America, any good will and any trust that we have left after Donald Trump, if we default on our debt, who the hell knows?
At that point, supply chains could fall apart, global economic systems, which, by the way, didn't need to be built.
We've talked about this.
The neoliberal system didn't need to be structured like this, and it got turned into a doomsday machine, where, like, one domino goes down, and the next thing you know, you're, like, hiding behind, uh, you know, the remnants of society, again, scrounging for food and leftover pills.
It's horseshit, man.
It's straight-up horseshit.
And you're exactly right.
They're going to kick the can down the road to December.
And we're just going to do this again.
We're just going to continue to do this and play footsie with absolute disaster.
It is one of the more infuriating things to happen in a very long time.
Oh, I mean, and just by the way, like in another edition of Republicans Being Hypocritical, we hear them wanting to fund the Defense Department and have, you know, really strong military and pro-military, and yet some of the things we've heard recently from the leaders of the Republican Party are so disrespectful towards the military that it's what Milley has gone through.
I mean, Matt Gaetz was like, "I should have been kicked out of the chamber." Tucker Carlson is even worse, and now they're trying to say that CRT is infiltrating the military.
And it really is a disgusting display of just how hypocritical they can be be on the side of military and strong defense, whatever, and then completely disregard what they are anyway.
And then also to be fiscally responsible, but then destroy the deficit and then not wanna help us, help anybody, you know, extend the debt ceiling so that we can actually pay for these things.
This is not politics.
This is not a democracy. - No, this is literally holding a gun to the head of the American public.
That's what it is.
And, you know, you wanna bring up Republican hypocrisy.
Let's go straight to the source, the queen alien of Republican hypocrisy in the modern era.
Mitch McConnell was kind enough to release a statement on this today.
And by the way, he did this, and I'm going to tell you what the media did immediately as he said this.
The media, like a bunch of trained dogs, immediately read this statement.
And again, we're going to read it in whole, and you're going to hear how much bullshit is contained in this statement.
The media, like trained dogs, were just like, oh, look at Leader McConnell.
I mean, just, he's ready to do this.
I mean, you know, say what you want about Turtle Man, but when push comes to shove, he really shows up and helps.
This is what McConnell says.
And it's captioned, My New Statement on the Democrats' Self-Created Debt Limit Crisis.
That's the caption, Nick.
That's the caption.
Self-created.
Love it.
Self-created.
U.S.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell issued the following statement today on the debt limit.
You can just see Chuck Todd putting on his glasses.
You know what I mean?
He's like, time to find out what the leaders think.
The Unified Democratic Government had two and a half months to address the debt limit through reconciliation.
Instead, they drifted to the doorstep of yet another self-created Democrat crisis.
Whether through miscalculation or a deliberate effort to bully their own members into wrecking the Senate, top Democrats have risked adding a default crisis to the inflation crisis, border crisis, and Afghanistan crisis they've already created.
That's the first graph.
Republicans remain the only party with a plan to prevent default.
We've already made it clear we would assist in expediting the 304 reconciliation process for stand-alone debt limit legislation to protect the American people from a near-term Democrat-created crisis.
We will also allow Democrats to use normal procedures to pass an emergency debt limit extension at a fixed dollar amount to cover current spending levels into December.
This will moot Democrats' excuses about the time crunch they created and give the unified democratic government more than enough time to pass standalone debt limit legislation through reconciliation.
Alternatively, if Democrats abandon their efforts to ram through another historically reckless taxing and spending spree that will hurt families and help China, and held China, a more traditional bipartisan governing conversation could be possible.
He is saying, give up your entire agenda, give up helping human beings and human projects, and maybe we'll save America from melting down economically.
And meanwhile, the D.C.
and New York political and punditry class, which is like, it's real leadership right there.
And gamesmanship, too, they love it.
Brinksmanship.
I think what he, he must think that by getting this in the news like this and getting to the brink, he could save the day in the last second and become the hero of all this.
Which probably could very well happen that way.
He could get a win-win.
He could absolutely get a win-win.
He comes through being the quote-unquote leader and he gets rid of the entire agenda.
He could do that, absolutely.
So yeah, amidst all those words, the salad of words that he put together there, what he's trying to get them to do is simply take care of a debt ceiling by itself.
We've already heard from a lot of the progressives why it's so important to bundle all these things together for maximum leverage so that actually gets past both the Build America Back, Great Again, Damn It, whatever the hell it's called, reconciliation, and then infrastructure.
So, listen, Democrats can never get a good name for these bills, right?
Oh, no.
And they keep going.
So it's interesting because we could really vilify Mitch McConnell all we like, and it's certainly, you know, the greatest hits make that possible.
But, you know, this keeps circling back to the fact that we don't have to be in the situation at all.
And the Democrats could, and so he's right in some respects, they could take care of all these things in one shot with two more votes in the Senate.
That's it.
It's all I need.
And by the way, the Democrats, and you want to talk about a party, we've talked about this at length on this podcast.
When the Democrats have power, they have no idea what the hell to do with it.
Like, they just have no clue.
For the most part, they basically serve as sort of an opposition party, right?
Like, they'll come in and they'll say, I'm sorry, but in this entire situation, they can't decide on a position.
They're talking about possibly moving past the filibuster.
They say this, by the way, in a conference, and you can almost hear every person turning in the room to Sinema and Manchin, who have not gone on record one way or another, but they're not going to do it.
They're not going to move past the filibuster.
They talk about possibly doing it through reconciliation.
It's not clear that's going to happen.
Now McConnell, if this was a chessboard, has just moved his pieces into check, not checkmate.
And basically the Democrats now have to put a number on things.
And that number is going to figure into every piece of legislation and every agenda item that gets passed.
And so they have yet to reconcile for themselves as a party what they're going to do next, what direction to go into.
And so they have an inability to pick movement.
And the Republican Party, by the way, is just lockstep.
Always lockstep.
They know where they're going to go.
They know what they're going to do.
The Democratic Party, in this case, they've got backed into a corner again.
Yeah, I mean, listen, you describe the Republican Party, I feel like, in terms of what they normally are.
The Democrats, like, you know, they try.
They flail around a lot, and it's a lot of, like, hand-wringing and whatever, but at least there's, like, effort to do something and get things done, whereas the Republicans are like... Do you know what it reminds me of?
What?
Let's put it in basketball terms real fast.
It reminds me of a guy who, like, takes the ball at the top of the key and dribbles around for 10 seconds, like, with flashy moves, and then just, like, loses the ball.
That's the Democrats?
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, there's a lot of talk about what they would do if they ever gained power, and then they get in power and suddenly they're terrified of being called radical.
Right.
Well, then the Republicans, the guy, like, in the corner, who's clapping his hands loudly, like, demanding the ball, and, like, no one wants to pass to him.
Like, that's that, that's the Republicans, right?
Dude, I miss it every shot, you know?
Right.
Right.
But, like, as the ball's in the air, he's already, like, he's preening down the court like it's in, and then it just completely bricks off the backboard.
Yeah.
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