Isaac Saul (9:12)

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Lorenzo (9:56)

How hard it is to find the perfect pair. But step into a Warby Parker store and you'll see it doesn't have to be. Not only will you find a great selection of frames, you'll also meet helpful advisors and friendly optometrists. Yep, many Warby Parker locations also offer eye exams. So the next time you need glasses, sunglasses, contact lenses or a new prescription, you know where to look. To find a Warby Parker store near you. Or to book an eye exam, head over to warbyparker.com retail.

Ari Weitzman (10:32)

Let'S start with what the left is saying. The left criticizes Republicans approach to the budget process, arguing the proposed spending cuts would hurt average Americans. Some say the budget plans rest on flawed assumptions. Others say Democrats should refuse to bail out Republicans if they can't win support for the budget within their own ranks. In the Washington Post, Katherine Rampel wrote, to pay for tax cuts, the GOP's budget plan goes full scrooge. Republicans have been trying for years to reduce federal health programs and nutritional assistance, including their disastrous attempts to repeal Obamacare in 2017. But now that they're desperate to extend and expand the Trump tax cuts. They are especially motivated to shred the safety net because they need to find cost savings somewhere, Rampel said. Republican lawmakers seem inclined to give him most of what he wants. So how do they plan to fill their gaping budget hole? They claim they'll do it through a combination of fake math, non binding promises and shanking the poor. Exactly how committees will slice and dice these programs is not specified. Republicans might cut programs under the guise of new or stricter work requirements, for example. This idea often polls well, but when Medicaid work requirements were briefly tried during Trump's first term, they ended up backfiring, Rampel wrote. The White House is explicitly trying to flood the zone with distressing developments. Constitutional crises, trade wars, data deletions, law enforcement purges, gutted agencies. It all deserves your attention, but don't take your eye off Congress. In Bloomberg, Catherine Ann Edwards argued House Republicans Budget plan gets poverty all Wrong House Republicans released a budget proposal that effectively calls for a $4.5 trillion tax cut funded by $1.5 trillion in reduced spending and borrowing the remaining 3 trillion. Proponents of the bill say it's not about spending cuts, but making programs less vulnerable to waste, fraud and abuse, in particular wasting benefits on people not worthy of them, edwards wrote. Such thinking exposes a fundamental misunderstanding of poverty, one that disregards the economic reality of being a low income American in favor of broad judgment and harsh policy. Enduring poverty myths propel misguided policy, like a tax cut financed via lower spending envisioned by Republicans. If the myths were true, the reasonable conclusion is that policy needs to fix these people. The economy is fine, the labor market is fine, the housing market is fine, health insurance is fine. It's these people and their choices that need addressing, edwards said. But these myths aren't true, which means that instead policy needs to address the economic and labor market shortcomings that generate poverty and hardship. It puts into perspective just how much is lost with yet another sprawling, multi trillion dollar debt financed tax cut. At msnbc, Michael A. Cohen said Trump and the GOP have boxed themselves into a corner on the budget. One of Trump's first moves as president was an attempt to freeze federal spending that had been authorized and appropriated by Congress. Why should Democrats support another funding measure if they can't be sure Trump will spend the money they give to the executive branch, Cohen wrote. Furthermore, with an extraordinarily narrow two seat majority in the House and a track record of GOP economicalism regarding government funding measures, there's a real question as to whether House Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican from Louisiana, can cobble together enough Republican votes. At this point, the potential for a government shutdown is pretty much the only arrow in the Democratic quiver to stop the damage that Trump and Musk have wrought in just three weeks, cohen said. Moreover, Trump's extremism has given Democrats little choice. If Republicans need Democratic votes to keep the government open, how could Democrats explain to their supporters giving them away without a king's ransom in return, especially after the White House's blithe dismissal of congressional prerogatives? That's it for what the left is saying now, for what the right is saying. The right varies in its response to the budget proposals, with many saying Republicans should do what it takes to renew the Trump tax cuts. Some worry that Republicans aren't committed to reducing the federal deficit. Others say the House and Senate have a challenging road ahead despite the GOP controlling both chambers, the New York Post editorial board wrote. Republicans need to make tough choices to save the Trump tax cuts the nation urgently needs Congress to save the Trump tax cuts, but Republicans in Congress are going to need some fancy footwork to make that happen. To get any budget items passed, GOP lawmakers and President Donald Trump himself will need to accept compromises, the board said. For starters, cementing votes will be a monster hurdle, since GOP control in each House is dangerously thin. Equally problematic if all the Trump tax cuts pass, revenue won't cover spending, and the last thing Republicans will want to do is increase red ink. Dems, meanwhile, have threatened to block GOP budget bills that they're not happy with, even if it means shutting down the government. No wonder House Republicans hope to dispense all their tax and spend issues in one big, beautiful bill, as Trump calls it. They fear they'll only get one chance to muster a majority, the board wrote. The key House committee passed an initial blueprint calling for a maximum $4.5 trillion in tax cuts, well short of what's needed to cover all of Trump's asks. Gopeers added a provision to up that maximum under certain conditions, but something we'll still likely have to give. In the Dispatch, Jessica Riedel explored Republicans underwhelming budget the new House budget resolution would likely add $3.3 trillion to 10 year deficits. These costs will dwarf the largely symbolic Doge budget savings and show a Republican government once again dramatically driving budget deficits upward, Riedel said. The Congressional Budget Office's latest baseline projections show Washington running $21 trillion in budget deficits over the 2025-2034 period covered in the Republican budget proposal pushing the federal debt held by the public from $29 trillion to $50 trillion. All signs point to steeply rising budget deficits. Baseline annual deficits were already headed toward $3 trillion within a decade due to growing Social Security, Medicare and interest payments on the national debt, riedel wrote. Even the $1.2 trillion mandatory program savings assigned to various committees assume a combination of Republican unanimity and aggressive budget cutting that has never before occurred. The most likely outcome is that Congress ultimately reduces taxes, shelves most spending cuts, sees interest rates rise further and brings deficits approaching $4 trillion within a decade. In National Review, Dan McLaughlin wrote that Republicans are unreconciled on spending if they can keep their slim caucuses united, Republicans have the votes to pass without Democratic support anything that is properly channeled through reconciliation, McLaughlin said. If Republicans can reach a budget they all agree on, Trump should be willing to give ground on impoundment authority because such a budget can be written so that it accomplished what impoundment is supposed to be aimed at, spending money only on the things that either Congress explicitly authorizes or the president approves. But there are two major problems. First, Trump's real goals extend to other things as well, such as reshaping programs previously authorized by Congress or bending agency staff to his will. The latter of those ought to be easier within the executive power. The former involves improperly sapping the power of Congress, McLachlan wrote. Second, getting the budget just right is a lot of work and it will take a lot of time. And it's far from clear that the current House and Senate Republican caucuses can stay united enough to agree on it. This whole process as including the Democrats because Republicans can't get all of that done through the proper budget channels in time to fund the government by mid March. All right, that's it for what the left and right are saying. Which brings us to my take. It's federal budget season, which means a lot of head spinning numbers and congressional dysfunction. But before we can truly appreciate the depth of the latter, we need to really understand the former. Here are some facts about the budget. In fiscal year 2024, the federal budget deficit was $1.8 trillion. That's 1,800 billion dollars or 35 departments of energy. And again, that's just the deficit. For more perspective, the entire discretionary federal budget, or everything that can legally be controlled through the reconciliation process was 1.7 trillion in fiscal year 2024. That's equivalent to 2,125 consumer financial protection bureaus. The mandatory spending for the federal budget. That's Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, income security programs, VA benefits and retirement plans. That was $3.9 trillion in fiscal year 2024. That's over double the entire discretionary spending budget. Lastly, interest on the national debt accounted for a full $700 billion, or a bit less than three times the cost of the entire federal government workforce, which is about 270 billion. I think laying out all these numbers in clear terms is essential to understanding what balancing the budget actually means. If you want to meaningfully cut the deficit, you have to either bring those numbers down or significantly raise revenues or federal taxes, which were roughly $4.4 trillion in fiscal year 2023. Leaving revenue increases aside for a moment, if you're looking to cut spending, these are the biggest areas of the budget. Again, all in fiscal year 2023 numbers. Health care or Medicare. And Medicaid, which is mandatory spending, was $1.5 trillion. Social Security, which is also mandatory spending, $1.3 trillion. Defense, which is discretionary spending, $800 billion. Interest on federal debts, number four, 660 billion. Those are the top four budget line items for the federal government. Now that's not to opine on what ought to be cut or how to prioritize these items over one another. It's only to state the plain fact that these four areas comprise 70% of all federal spending. If you delete the entire rest of the federal budget and these four areas remain the same, the budget is only balanced. These top line numbers are essential to keep in mind when Congress talks about responsible funding cuts or when Elon, Musk and Doge claim they're doing anything meaningful to the federal budget by pulling contracts, funding or workers salaries in order to truly appreciate the depths of their unseriousness. So the Senate wants to pass a spending bill first, then a funding bill second. All right, what do they want to enact? A $345 billion increase in three places. 175 for border security, 150 for defense, and 20 for the coast Guard. Now, I'd love to do a breakdown of each of those items and judge them as a matter of policy. But let me first address how Republicans intend to pay for those increases. To get a sense of that, since this is just the spending bill, we should look at the House bill. The House wants to pass a spending and funding bill at the same time. This gets a bit complicated because they're using a time span of a decade rather than breaking it out over a fiscal year, but this is a common practice in that context. The House GOP is proposing $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over the next decade, dependent on finding $2 trillion in cuts to mandatory spending at the same time. Now, to their credit, the House is looking for cuts in at least one meaningful place, Medicaid. Specifically by paying for Medicaid based on population instead of the current open ended entitlement system. To repeat, I'm not opining on the merits of this plan or the merits of cutting Medicaid spending in general. I'm just bluntly stating that this is one of the biggest areas where there is funding to cut and the House is right to look there. However, proposed increases to discretionary spending from the House more than cancel out the changes to Medicaid spending and cuts to other federal programming. Not to mention the fact that President Trump directed Congress not to touch Medicare or Medicaid. So that's a decidedly mixed signal on what Republicans are actually going to cut. Furthermore, the top line math on revenue cuts paired with budget cuts doesn't make a ton of sense at first glance, since 4.5 trillion in revenue cuts is greater than 2 trillion in spending cuts. However, Republicans believe that tax cuts encourage economic stimulus that spurs more revenues over time. So they argue this spending is net neutral, even totally ceding that point, which many economists don't. And even assuming these cuts to mandatory spending are enacted, the House's plan will still increase the deficit over the span of a decade by about $3 trillion. The House knows this. A balanced budget for five years somewhat maddeningly means an increased debt and a federal deficit because of our fourth largest spending item, interest on existing debt. That brings me to congressional dysfunction and to be frank, the whole back and forth between the chambers. Should it be two bills or one? Is Mike Johnson outmaneuvering John Thune? Is Trump undermining the Senate? Is the House Freedom Caucus increasing its influence? Should we increase offshore drilling? Can Republicans include all the priorities before a government shutdown? Will Democrats play a ball? It's all so tedious. It's a fight for control of the captain's wheel while the ship is sinking. It's a high school putting on a school play while the building's on fire. It's another melodrama from a party with control of both chambers of Congress and the White House squabbling over how they're going to keep the government from shutting down and the deficit neutral after years in years of sounding the alarm that what we truly need is a harsh look at reality and some stiff cuts. I feel that urgency. I'm 37 years old. I'm going to be inheriting the debt that our increasingly aging Congress is increasingly saddling me and people in my age group with. I've been compelled by the conviction that every Congressional Republican directed at President Biden's trillion dollar pandemic recovery spends, conviction that they have now seemed to abandon for a fun game of who can curry the President's favor the most, with the blessed exception of the idealistically consistent Senator Rand Paul from Kentucky Congress. Where is your urgency? What are you doing? I really want to do a deeper analysis here. I would love to do an analyst job in getting in the numbers and compare what each budget line item does and where the cuts make the most sense and just evaluate this as a matter of policy. But I what's the point? I can't. It's an obviously fruitless exercise. The House can pass their bill as advertised, the Senate can pass theirs and pair it with some similarly tough but feckless budget cuts and tax cuts balancing act. Or they can meet in the middle. It doesn't matter. The deficit is going to decrease. The national debt is going to get worse. Congress is failing us. We'll be right back after this quick break.

Isaac Saul (27:28)

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Ari Weitzman (28:47)

All right, well, that's it for my take. Which brings us to your questions answered. This one comes from John from Charlotte, North Carolina, who asks there have been a lot of resignations in the news regarding Trump's actions as well as with the Eric Adams situations. What do these people accomplish by resigning? Won't Trump just replace them with someone loyal to him? How does it help in any way? Audrey Moorhead, our associate editor, answered this question today. Audrey said, you're right that at a small scale, an individual resignation doesn't mean much. Take the example of Danielle Sassoon. She left her post as acting attorney for the Southern District of New York in protest of the Justice Department's directive to dismiss the Eric Adams case. However, Sassoon was only fulfilling the position in the interim, while Trump's pick for the position, Jay Clayton, awaits confirmation. Trump will need to find someone else to assume the interim posting, but in the grand scheme of things, Sassoon's departure is a small, temporary setback for the government. That said, there are several reasons why Sassoon and others feel the need to resign and why they believe their resignations could do some good. For one thing, Sassoon likely would have been fired if she hadn't resigned, which would have allowed the DOJ to control the initial narrative of her departure. Instead, she published her resignation letter and defined a moral case for her decision, attracting more attention to her situation and to the case itself. It also set a precedent for other prosecutorial resignations in protest of DOJ orders, including Sassoon's colleagues in the Southern District. History also provides evidence of cases where resignations like these can affect change, especially when they happen on a larger scale. The most prominent example is probably the Saturday Night Massacre, a series of high profile resignations during the Watergate scandal that was the tipping point of leading to President Nixon's resignation. While I don't think the resignations happening now will have quite the same effect, they've undeniably caught public attention and combined with pushback from the judge considering the case dismissal, it's not unreasonable for these officials to hope their resignations might make the DOJ and the Trump administration reconsider some of their decisions. All right, that's it for our listener question today. Now let's turn to the under the radar story. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump issued an executive order designating cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. This week, the State Department officially added eight Latin American gangs to its terror list. The named gangs include six Mexican drug cartels, Venezuela's Trenda, Aragua, El Salvador's Mara Salvatruca or MS.13. They join roughly 60 Islamic militant groups on the list, the designation which fulfills one of Trump's campaign promises will enable stricter sanctions against members of these gangs, as well as potential military action. The Wall Street Journal has the story, and you can click the link in the episode description for more alright, now for today's 112.26% that's the U.S. debt as a percentage of GDP in 2023, according to the International Monetary Fund. 49.92% that's Canada's debt as a percentage of their GDP in 2023 1974, the year the budget reconciliation process was created by the Congressional Budget and Empowerment Control Act. 23 the number of budget reconciliation bills passed by Congress and signed into law to date. 4 the number of budget reconciliation bills passed by Congress but vetoed by the President $4 trillion the projected increase in primary deficits over the next decade on a conventional basis if the provisions in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs act are permanently extended, according to a study by Penn Wharton. 16% the projected increase in the federal debt by 2054 relative to current law if the tax cuts are permanently extended plus 0.2% the projected increase in GDP by 2054 relative to current law if the tax cuts are permanently extended. Alright, here's your have a nice day story at the age of 15, Ted Midgley left school when he couldn't find support for his dyslexia. Consequently, he never learned how to read and spent the next 40 years of his life only knowing how to spell his name when an opportunity arose for Midgley, now 58, to be a manager for a professional motorcycle racer. His lifelong passion for speedway motivated him to learn to read. Needing to be able to read emails, Midgley applied himself to the challenge, working one on one with a tutor and eventually achieving his goal. In addition to enjoying new job prospects, Midgley can now read a Speedway Star magazine that he had kept for 40 years, the BBC as the story. All right everybody, that's it for today's episode. As always, if you'd like to support our work, you can head over to retangle.com and sign up for a membership. We now are offering bundled newsletter and podcast memberships, so check that out. You can also sign up just for a paid podcast subscription@retangle.com paid podcast memberships get you ad free daily podcasts, Friday editions, the Sunday podcast, interviews, bonus content, and so much more. Just as a heads up for our upcoming schedule tomorrow, we've got that Friday edition for Isaac Sunday. I'm sitting down with John Law to talk about the whole week as he's replacing Will, who is giving a talk in Hamilton College and Will was replacing Isaac, who had been on paternity leave. That's all for us today. We'll be right back here tomorrow. Talk to you soon. Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by Dewey Thomas. Our script is edited by Ari Weitzman, Will Kaback Daily Saul and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was made by Magdalena Bokova, who is also our social media manager. The music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. And if you are looking for more from Tangle, please go check out our website@readtangle.com that's readtangle.com.

Lorenzo (35:11)

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