 I'm Tim Apachele, your host and this week's topic and title is agreement on the debt limit at a huge price and with me today to discuss this issue is my co-host Jay Fidel and our special esteemed guest Chuck Crumpton. Good morning gentlemen. Morning Tim. You know we're getting very busy. We're going to be discussing the deal struck between Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden. There's a lot of people who are very upset. The MAGA GOP are flaming red hot mad. And on the Democratic progressive side we have a lot of environmentalists who are none too pleased. But to discuss that but before we discuss that hey Chuck I want to go to you. I want to talk about how the media is portraying the negotiation and how they're portraying the negotiation right at this moment. That's a really good question because the media presents its own perspective on things as we know. And they can do it either with a comprehensive truth and accuracy orientation or they can do it with a whatever is going to attract the most readers, viewers, audience. The media for at least the last few years, the Trump years and continuing have chosen route too which is viewership over truth and accuracy at any expense. So what we're seeing right now is media portraying the debt to the public. And that's what we're seeing right now is media portraying ceiling negotiations as a win-lose competition who won. If they were going to choose an approach that was designed to maximize the risk to approval of such an agreement and the public interest harm from the risk of disapproval or misrepresentation of the debt to the public. And nobody is portraying it as this was a compromise. Everybody got something except Joe Biden. Let me ask you, this one appears that's going to pass. I think Hakeem Jeffries from the House has expressed that he's encouraging all Democrats to vote for this in the House of Representatives. I'm not saying it's a slam dunk but it looks like this thing is going to pass. What if this thing was a lot closer and the media was playing this off as the way they are? A win-lose negotiation and could that have disrupted the apple cart so to speak? You've got to think about one other thing though, Tim, which is from McCarthy who took 15 votes to get his vote. He's not going to get the vote. He's not going to get the vote allegedly agreed to some conditions that put him at an especially high risk of losing that speakership and that authority. He can't afford to have a situation where the majority of Republicans vote against a deal that he may. He needs at least a majority of Republicans to get his vote. That's 100% by any means. He may get enough Democratic votes to put the vote over the top. That's the negotiation. That's the bipartisan aspect of this that really deserves far more media attention and investigation than its receipt. Let's see how that works out. I think we're going to have to get this thing passed. To what degree do you think Joe Biden's favorability and or credibility has been damaged by the way this deal has been negotiated from the very start? There was a piece of paper which we put on our daily e-mail advisory about that. There's no question that it has to do with the credibility and popularity in some circles anyway. He started out with a red line and then he crossed his own red line. He said I won't negotiate and then promptly negotiated. I don't know if people forgot that. What I mean is that a lot of people walking around thinking what happened? He explained why he ignored his own red line. He has been silent on explaining that and very troublesome I think. It's troublesome to me and I think it's troublesome to a lot of people and I think in terms of his credibility for 2024 he's lost credibility. But whenever the result is he has not been strong. If he had never said anything about the red line he would have lost credibility. But this whole scenario does not work in his favor and you think of other things that have happened during his administration and you say this guy doesn't stick with it. This guy is not strong. That's what you think. Is it just an issue of him not being able to separate the debt ceiling increase from the budget itself for the next 10 years? Did he fail on that effort? Is that his problem? To me this is all out of Kafka. I really need to know if you agree with that. It's all a very strange alternative universe. We have a debt ceiling. We've already incurred the debt. Trump himself incurred $4.0 trillion in the last few years. The last couple of years of his administration $4 trillion. A lot of the money that the Republicans are hammering on is money that was adopted and enacted during the Trump administration. I get a complete disconnect on this. There should be no issue about the debt ceiling. Lift the debt ceiling and then you negotiate the budget separately. And I think that it would have been just fine for Joe Biden to stick on that point because that's historically what usually has happened. We are in this alternate universe. Another part of the alternate universe is that the Republicans themselves don't represent the negotiated results by Kevin McCarthy. That's extraordinary. They have these negotiations. They spend weeks negotiating with other Republicans. A number of them in the Freedom Caucus don't agree. And so what you have is chaos. They're creating chaos again more even among themselves. And this is very threatening to the country that we can't seem to respect the old red line of keep the debt ceiling different from the budget. Correct. Well, let me just run past the positives and what the Democrats will perceive as negatives of this deal struck. Number one is Joe Biden did avoid a debt default that would have thrown this economy and the world economy in real chaos. Number two is that he was able to extend it for two years. So that's off the table for at least two years. Biden did protect Social Security, Medicaid, and other benefits. I'm sure there's some other benefits that were preserved, but those are the top that come to mind. Things that progressive Democrats are very upset about is there are now work requirements associated with SNAP benefits. SNAP is the term for old food stamps. Supplemental nutrition and I don't remember the last two letters of that. But that now kicks in for anyone younger for work benefits for food stamps. SNAP benefits. There's expedited permits for energy products, especially a natural gas pipeline from Virginia all the way through the state, and that makes the environmentalist of the Democratic wing fuming mad. There's steam rolling out of the ears. There is a military spending limited to 1%. So there's a cap on for quite a while for the 1% increase of budget spending. They're going to shift $10 billion out of Biden's IRS funding that was passed. I think that was $80 billion. Now $10 billion gets stripped out of that, and I think that's over a 10-year period. And then there's the return of $50 to $7 billion unspent in COVID funds. They go back to the budget for redistribution. And at least there is the reinstatement of payments that students will now need to start paying on as a result. Remember in COVID, there was a suspension of school debt. Now that suspension has been removed off the table. So let me get your reaction, Jay and Chuck to what I just stated, both on the positive side and potentially on the negative side. Jay. Well, I think a lot of that is ideological policy is something else. It's the Republican non-platform operating. What strikes me is a lot of the people who are going to suffer because those cuts are Republicans, or Trump's base. I find it extraordinary that it's sort of throwing on the wall and see if it sticks kind of negotiation. When you have this, you don't have good, thoughtful public policy where reasonable men and women will get into a room and really negotiate. This is just an expression of one side beating up on the other. It is a win-lose mentality on various issues. For example, knocking off some of the additional funding for the IRS will have a leverage effect. They won't be able to collect as much money. What's that about? Of course, we should talk about the tax side of this. There's no additional taxes as I understand it. What we have is a libertarian view of making governments smaller. That's what happened here. I think we have an example of divisiveness on a lot of these issues. Climate change, any broad-based journalist will tell you is the most important story, the most existential threat to our planet and our global society. And yet, we don't care about it. A lot of this is ideological. A lot of it is the old Republican platform. I think they made inroads in Biden's initiatives. They wanted to show that they had the clout. They wanted to show that they could really have an effect on things and they have. Check was your question. Did Biden have either Biden's accomplishments or the things that he had to trade away in order to get this deal with House Speaker McCarthy? Well, three things. First of all, if you look at Joe Biden as you want him to be or you believe he should be, then Jay's assessment holds water. If you look at him who he really is in Washington, which is a center right Democratic politician who is deeply committed to bipartisan deals to implement government policy. He's been exactly who he has always been and that's worked for him. If you look at the media as of today, most of them, even the conservative media, are saying Biden won the negotiation, the Democrats won the negotiation. They prevented the Republicans from getting what they really wanted, what the MAGA GOP wanted and they held on to the things. Let me jump in right there. What in your opinion does the MAGA GOP want? Well, first of all, they claim they wanted actual spending reduction. They didn't get that. They got limited spending increases but they did not get a reduction. They got some reductions in some general areas, but if you look at those six categories you laid out, every one of those can be administratively managed and adjusted. The office of budget management and budget is run by the administration. Yeah, Congress sets out guidelines and parameters and limitations but unless somebody actually takes it all the way through court up to the US Supreme Court, what the administrative executive branch people do is going to dictate what the operational level actions on behalf of the government are in all those areas. So, if you look at what the Republicans especially the MAGA GOP said they wanted most budget reductions work requirements cuts to areas that would include everything except social security and veterans benefits. They didn't get that. Well, let me just float a balloon here because I would argue that the MAGA GOP doesn't want the deal because quite frankly I think they're looking for chaos. Chaos within government. Chaos in our financial economic markets. Chaos for an opportunity for their agenda, their true agenda which they don't like to overtly discuss but it's all about bringing in fascism and a fascist dictator by the name of Donald Trump. I think that's really why they're upset because this thing's going to go through and maybe I'm wrong but many times on this. Can I stop you there Tim? Yes. There's a fair chance it will go through. There's also a fair chance it won't go through. If it doesn't go through we still have the same problem we talked about last week and I really worry that A. There will be pushback by the most conservative Republicans that may actually stall it which is really amazing given the fact that the President of the United States and the Speaker of the House spent weeks negotiating this. The other aspect is that don't forget guys that this is kind of precedent. It will happen again. It will happen in two years. We'll be back to square one first base again trying to get the debt ceiling raised or whatever it is and we'll be held hostage again. We'll be held hostage again. We'll be held hostage again. We'll be held hostage again. I have left an office for his first term. Is this the time for him to explore the provisions of the 14th Amendment to make sure that doesn't happen? I assume he's been exploring that for the last few weeks. If Larry Tribe has been exploring it and presumably he's aware of the issue and he should be exploring it. It's not going to mean anything if it's not ratified. It'll mean a lot. The point is do they be preparing for the next round of potential anarchy in our government system by the MAGA GOP? I would. I would. Chuck, is House Speaker McCarthy going to hear or feel any of the ramifications of his support for this deal by the MAGA GOP? Is it going to try to vote him or remove him as Speaker of the House? It only takes one vote or one person to bring it up. Yeah. If you look at what's happened within the last week and we know that polls are consistently unreliable but the polls were indicating that a substantial majority of Americans polled faulted the Republicans for putting the default risk out there. McCarthy has to be aware of that. He's got a completely split party and he had to make a choice in these negotiations which element of that party he was going to have to hold on to to try to maintain his power and his image. He's an ambitious guy so I don't think he gave up anything that he didn't very carefully intend to do. His alliance with the MAGA GOP is artificial temporary and if he could get rid of it I'm sure he would. You know we talked a little bit about those couple of provisions that were given up in order to get this negotiation straight forward. One of them of course was work requirements for SNAP benefits. I recall back in the Ginnrich days that there was something called welfare to work and that was quite the Herculean effort to get those who are receiving welfare payments to actually go to work. So there's that one provision now for students to start paying on their debt. For those individuals in this country that are on the economic fringe does this push them over the edge or even closer to the edge? Chuck? Well first of all both of those are subject to administrative executive decisions as to what and when and how they choose to enforce any of that stuff. The likelihood that the Biden administration is going to aggressively enforce the collection of student debt whether it's on the books and accruing or not is no more likely now than it was two weeks ago or two months ago. I have not seen a policy change on behalf of Biden or the Democrats on that. The problem for the Republicans is because they didn't get anything that gives them more power or more leverage in debt ceiling negotiations. Yeah, it's only a year and a half. January 1st of 2025 whoever that new president may be they're going to face this thing again and Jay is exactly right. It's going to be another war. But who will run that war? Who will dominate that war at that point in time is going to depend on the 2024 elections. We're just guessing that McCarthy has bet that the 2024 elections are going to go better for him than they will for Trump and the MAGA GOP. He has to bet that because if MAGA GOP prevails over him and whoever his faction might be he's out. He doesn't really have any choice as to who he casts his lot with. But you know let me add that this not only has an effect on Biden's prospects in 2024 it evolves the rest of the horse race and so you get Trump opposing the deal saying you guys should have stuck with the right-wing approach on this and you get DeSantis one of my favorite people ever you know he is taking the same position Nikki Haley is taking this position and Scott is taking this you know all of the Republican candidates all of them that we know about maybe there's an exception out there somewhere are saying this deal is not good enough for the Republicans and you know I don't know if you asked this implicitly or expressly Tim but you know the country has to have a reaction to the list of horribles that got thrown away in this negotiation and as I said before some of the people who are affected are Republicans they may be disadvantaged but they're also Republicans so they're not going to be really happy when they realize how they're affected but there are other people maybe independents and certainly Democrats are going to say this is really awful and if these guys that is the guys in the Republican horse race saying it's not good enough and we like the original hard-nosed approach so they're also going to come to the conclusion that the Republican party that is the people both sides come to the conclusion the Republican party is unhinged they're not even respecting an agreement that they participated in making so I think that at the end of the day this has got to be confirmed by the Republicans including the Freedom Caucus or else they will have such a stink-eyed black-eyed in the view of the public in general that they will suffer greatly in the 2024 election it seems to me when Janet Yellen multiple times was talking about the ill effects of not extending the debt ceiling she used generic broad-based terms like recession, interest rate increase you know financial markets and chaos but they really didn't dig down deep enough I don't think that described exactly what does that mean what does it mean when the United States for the first time defaults on its ability to pay its its creditors and the damage that it's very difficult to describe but I don't think they did a very good job of it so the benefits of extending this ceiling I think Joe Biden gets a round of applause and the things that were given up it could have been far, far worse am I wrong in that assessment either of you I would agree with you but I would add one point that came up in your comment a minute ago and that is this although Joe Biden did not speak loudly enough about the red line problem he had Janet Yellen and a number of other members of administration giving us what would happen if this deal failed that is if the the debt ceiling were not raised and they saturated the airwaves with that for weeks you think Americans understood it not necessarily and I'm not saying that they were correct either this is speculative but the fact is they made it sound so horrible so nightmarish that in effect they pasted that risk on the Republicans and I think that also works in the crucible of 2024 that we would have been in Armageddon and Janet Yellen did convey that message and so I think that's a factor here Chuck you had a comment on that yeah I think that's an important insight that both you and Jay have shared and that is that if the Republicans and certainly McCarthy have learned anything it's that you got to be careful where you place your chips if you place your chips on election denial which most Republicans did Senate and House in at the time of the insurrection that hasn't worked out well for them if they place their chips we're going to push this to the edge of default on the national debt nationally, domestically and internationally that doesn't work well for them I think Jay's exactly right I think if you ask the question who blinked everybody blinked but to come out after and say we didn't just cost them even more credibility so I think Jay is exactly right when it comes around to 2024 you know if you look at the economic measures that have been put in place if you look at the debt ceiling and budget deal that is being worked out and as Jay indicates probably will be passed that's more favorable to Biden than it is to the Republicans because their faction lies I want to add one other point to your point earlier you said this is Biden's career in Congress and especially in the Senate he's been bipartisan seeking solutions avoiding ranker and all that and I think the bottom line of everything we've talked about here today favors him why? is because he said after he failed on the bottom on the red line because he did negotiate a deal he did raise the debt limit he did avoid Armageddon and for that he looks like the peacemaker he looks good he looks like the one that solves problems so when you shake it and bake it you mentioned here today I think he won this game doesn't matter what the exact terms and the giveaways are on one side or the other he looks like the reasonable statesman that's the way it came off good point and I agree hey we're almost out of time so last question we have probably in the next week or so we have former Vice President Mike Pence and former Governor of New Jersey Chris Christie they're going to enter into the GOP presidential ring for 2024 does the discussion or the debate change significantly for new rounds of negotiation no matter what it is does that sound different with these two candidates in the ring? some people say that the more candidates you have on the Republican side of that debate I say debate because that's where he went as he did before the more candidates you have on the stage with him the better it is for him because he knows how to distinguish himself and that would be the presumptive answer to your question however in past debates in past contensions among a field of Republican candidates they were either intimidated or unprepared for his style on the stage that is no longer the case I mean Pence to me is a non-event but Christie he has attacked Trump before and he may lead a charge against him so if Trump thinks he's going to have the same kind of experience with all the games he played with Hillary Clinton with all the games he played with the other Republican candidates I think he's wrong Christie may is likely to openly attack Trump in that debate and encourage other Republican candidates to do the same so I don't think we can assume that what happened before will happen again I think it will be different Chuck same question yeah I think Jay is exactly right that if you look at it superficially the script looks the same it looks like an ideal setting for Trump the more people in the mix the better for him because he stands out in his own way no matter how offensive it might be but Jay is right if you've got people like Christie who are willing to attack him much more aggressively than anyone ever has and you've got people like Tim Scott on the other side you know there are people who can actually coexist with other people and deal rationally and civilly with other people I happen to be one of those people I offer that a whole turn to Tim are you running for president Chuck we need to know Tim Scott oh sorry I took it the same way you did Jay I I would nominate if I had the power to do so alright guess what we've run out of time so quickly your last thoughts in the last month and a half on this whole mess and it hasn't passed but I think it's going to pass and I think they'll get both enough Democrat and Republican not GOP excuse me mega GOP Republicans but just good old fashioned Republicans that will vote this through in the house Jay your last thoughts on this whole thing having a stroke by stroke public disclosure public discussion of everything that goes back and forth it's all theater and it's not good for the country they should have done what they did in years past just raise the debt ceiling and get into hearings about the budget they didn't do that this is all this is all theater and it demonstrates that our congress is broken and I all I can say is that I am not encouraged in general I'm encouraged by the fact that we won't have Armageddon but in general I'm not encouraged with the efficiency the functionality of our congress and meanwhile they have not addressed so many problems facing this country they have abandoned public policy it's all theater alright Chuck can we get the last word on this well I think the key contrast over here you look over at the Democratic side of the fence and although there is resistance verbally from some of the progressive Democrats overall the Democrats and Biden have maintained a far more unified consistent front the Republicans are split against each other that offers a clear contrast so which voting coalitions come together to pass this debt ceiling budget combo deal in the House and in the Senate may tell us a lot more about the coalitions that are going to offer the most promise for the future and that may have an impact on the 2024 elections and connect with those coalitions the best so in the sense this whole thing has been beneficial if those coalitions do combine forces and get things done for the American people and with that I'd like to thank my co-host Jay Fiedel and our esteemed guest Chuck Crumpton for joining us today on American Issues Take One I'm Tim Apachele your host and won't you join us next week and until then aloha thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii if you like what we do please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo you can also follow us on Facebook Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com Mahalo