💰Mitch McConnell's Legacy, DOGE, and the Deficit💰

Discussion post for February 25, 2025

In today's episode, Sarah and Beth discuss Senator Mitch McConnell's announcement that he will not seek an eighth term in the United States Senate. They also discuss the potential impact of DOGE on the national debt, and, outside of politics, they talk about school snow days and how we learn at home.

Topics Discussed

• Senator Mitch McConnell’s Legacy

• DOGE

• The US Deficit

• Outside of Politics: Snow Days and Non-Traditional Instruction

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Episode Resources

Pantsuit Politics Resources

• Pride and Prejudice: September 2025 (Common Ground Pilgrimages)

Senator Mitch McConnel Announces His Retirement

• Opinion: Rand Paul is no 'pork' slicer. Good thing Mitch McConnell gets Kentucky its cut. (Courier Journal)

• Rand Paul wants DOGE to build a $500 billion rescission package for Congress to approve (Reason)

US Economy and Fiscal Future

• Denny’s reportedly adds egg surcharge amid rising prices and bird flu shortages (CNN Business)

• The U.S. Economy Depends More Than Ever on Rich People (The Wall Street Journal)

• Default, Transition, and Recovery: Monthly Defaulted Debt More Than Doubled To $14.9 Billion In August (S&P Global Ratings)

• Starbucks is laying off workers and paring back the menu as it tries to turn the business around (CNN)

• Fabrics retailer Joann to go out of business and close all of its stores (CNN)

• A Dozen Eggs, A Dozen Problems (More to Say by Pantsuit Politics)

• AI Reset: Layoffs, RTO, And The New Realities Of Work (Forbes)

• States consider raising health premiums for their employees (Axios Vitals)

• Trump and Elon Musk are floating 'DOGE dividends.' Low-income Americans might not get the benefits. (NBC News)

• Apple plans $500 billion in US investment, 20,000 research jobs in next four years (Reuters)

• House Republicans scramble for Plan B on Medicaid cuts (Politico)

• Stefanik’s Confirmation Is on Ice as Republicans Guard Their Scant Majority (The New York Times)

• Interest Expense on the Debt Outstanding (U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data)

• What's the Matter with Kansas? By Thomas Frank

• Steve Bannon Has Dark Warning for Republicans Planning to Cut Medicaid (Yahoo News)

• February 2025 Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll (Harvard Harris Poll)

Show Credits

Pantsuit Politics is hosted by Sarah Stewart Holland and Beth Silvers. The show is produced by Studio D Podcast Production. Alise Napp is our Managing Director and Maggie Penton is our Director of Community Engagement.

Our theme music was composed by Xander Singh with inspiration from original work by Dante Lima.

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Episode Transcript

Sarah [00:00:07] This is Sarah Stewart Holland.

Beth [00:00:09] This is Beth Silvers. You're listening to Pantsuit Politics, and today we're going to talk about money. How is the economy doing? What is the effect of all this DOGE activity? What's Congress up to? What does any of this mean for our debt and deficit? So lots to consider about money. And as we consider it, we thought we'd start by as Kentuckians weighing in on a man who knows a lot about money, and that is Mitch McConnell. Mitch has announced that he will not seek an eighth term in the Senate. At last, the fact. And so we're going to discuss that a little bit and process his legacy. And then Outside of Politics, at the very end, we're going to talk about school snow days, which we've had many of, and two trips Sarah and I are planning to lead this year that might help cure any of your winter blues.

Sarah [00:00:56] If you find the show helpful today, we get through this conversation and you think, oh my gosh, I think I understand the budget reconciliation process; then we have done our jobs and we hope that you will share that helpful information with a friend. Telling someone in real life about our podcast is still the best way to grow this community. We are so honored when we hear that you're sharing it with friends or husbands or family members. Thank you so much for every time you do that. It really does help grow the show.

Beth [00:01:23] Next up, let's have a little conversation about Senator Mitch McConnell. Sarah, Mitch McConnell went to the Senate when we were four years old. I feel like that says it all. He's been there since we were four years old in 1985. He's 83 years old. He is the longest serving senator in Kentucky's history.

Sarah [00:01:55] The situation is my rage towards Mitch McConnell has only been dampened because it's just hard to hate a fragile old man. I can get there if I work hard enough at it. If I really think back to those 40 plus years, especially every time I thought maybe this person can actually beat him. So many campaigns all the way back to my time at train Z where I thought, this person, this person is going to beat him. Never happened. And all the lifelong devotion to power, particularly to the open and robust flow of corporate money inside our electoral system, it's really the Supreme Court nomination. That's where really is the center of my white hot rage in mitch McConnell. I remember thinking, oh my God, we got this historical once in a lifetime opportunity. Justice Scalia died unexpectedly. This is it. This is our chance. And he stole it from us and stacked the court. And that is the center of his legacy, as far as I'm concerned.

Beth [00:03:08] In some of the pieces about his career, you'll see Republicans quoted talking about moments when McConnell explained to them that judicial power outlasts legislative power, and that's why prioritizing the courts is important. Not only did he deny President Obama a Supreme Court seat with just no justification for doing it, other than bare knuckle partisanship whatsoever. He held back a lot of lower court nominations so that when Trump was elected or the next Republican president was elected-- I don't think Mitch thought it was going to be Donald Trump. But when we had a new Republican president, that president would be able to appoint many, many people to lifetime seats on the federal bench. And really the state of the judiciary today has been shaped by no one to the degree that it's been shaped by Mitch McConnell.

Sarah [00:04:02] And I would love to get furiously angry about the way he abdicated his ethical, moral, professional responsibility as a United States senator to hold Donald Trump responsible for the insurrection on January 6th. But in order to be mad at someone, you have to believe they're capable of something. You know what I mean? I can't get mad about that because I thought he was so morally bankrupt at that point. It didn't even matter. I didn't even care. I was like, yeah, that sounds about right, that you'd stand up and say, oh, he's responsible for this, but I'm going to vote to acquit. So every time Donald Trump abused him or went after him, I don't even care. I'm like, you deserve this.

Beth [00:04:46] Well, I think if you want to know why Kentucky continued to reelect Mitch McConnell for seven terms, it's helpful to hear that a long time Kentucky columnist calls him 'Washington's biggest slicer of pork'. Mitch McConnell uses the appropriations process, and he has brought a lot of money back to Kentucky. I didn't know until this morning when I was doing some research. There is a big riverfront project in Owensboro, which is close to where I grew up.

Sarah [00:05:12] Oh my gosh, yes.

Beth [00:05:13] Fifty million dollars that Mitch McConnell got for that project.

Sarah [00:05:16] You didn't know that? Oh my God, we're obsessed with that project in Paducah. It always gets compared when we're talking about why can't we have something nice like Owensboro. Mitch McConnell then gave us a big ol' butt ton of money to do a similar riverfront development project, and it's just been a disaster. Let me say, I don't think everything that's happened at our riverfront is a disaster. But this happened a lot, like he would show up with these big amounts of money but he didn't really ask us what we needed or wanted. We talk a lot about unfunded mandates, but there's also a burden of funded unmandated-- I don't know the word I want. You know what I mean? Like where you just drop all this money in a community's lap without any real leadership or strategic vision for how that will help the community. There's a lot of emptiness with this federal funds. We want to talk about our next part of this conversation with DOGE and efficiency. Same for how Rogers and Central Kentucky-- yeah, you're just pumping money into the communities. But is Kentucky better off than it was when we were four years old? I don't think it is. I think it's more Partisan. I think the people of Eastern Kentucky are just as abandoned as they were when he started his term. The only thing that I watched get stronger over Mitch McConnell's term was the Kentucky Republican Party, propping up people like Jamie Comer, who fail upwards over and over and over again thanks to Mitch McConnell and his power brokering.

Beth [00:06:52] I think that's well said. It's going to be very interesting to see what happens in the race to replace him because I do think that with the rise of Donald Trump, the beast that Mitch McConnell helped create and grow will devour him. I don't think he can choose his successor now the way that he would have been able to a term ago. And what that will mean to him, I don't know. You can see in the appropriations process, though, and in a lot of his work, just a real inconsistency about everything except winning.

Sarah [00:07:26] Yes. Power. Power is the only value. And I hope that that is what his ultimate historical legacy will be, that he pursued power that harmed his home state, that harmed this institution that he dedicated his life to, the United States Senate, that harmed democracy. I don't think history is going to smile on Mitch McConnell. I think that the emptiness of his strategy in this pursuit of power at all costs has already run out of road and has already been shown to be empty. I guess besides the death grip on the Supreme Court, but that is also weakening the Supreme Court. I've been thinking about this a lot as we're looking at this man's legacy, particularly as it applies to the court. I don't want to come out of the second Trump administration with a stronger court. I'm starting to bristle every time I see a judge stopped it, somebody filed a lawsuit. That's not democracy. You know what I mean?

[00:08:33] That's not the transparent, responsive democracy that our founding fathers had involved. Just wait for the lawyers to fix it. That's not what we want. That's not going to help Partisanship. That's not going to help a more informed, engaged citizenry is just wait for the lawyers to fix it. Wait for the judges that you picked to do what you want. I really hope that as we're assessing the role of the federal government, that we really assess the role of the judiciary and where it comes up empty and where this long lasting power is not actually power. Or it's a very shallow power that doesn't lead to any sort of strength. Everything he's done again was just about propping up his party and his position. It didn't strengthen Kentucky. It didn't strengthen the Senate. It didn't strengthen our democracy. And I think that focus on the courts that he is so known for is just another reflection of that. And I hope we use the end of this power grab into this historical power broker to reassess some of this.

Beth [00:09:36] I don't think anyone is ever going to confuse Mitch McConnell for someone who believes that the people know what is best. We have a lot of Republicans jumping in with interest to run against Mitch McConnell. You should know that Governor Beshear has said he is not interested in running for the seat. Lieutenant Governor Coleman has said she is not interested in running for this seat. The Democrat who has stepped forward is Representative Pam Stevenson, and it sounds like her stepping forward may have cleared the Democratic field. I'm curious what you think about that, Sarah.

Sarah [00:10:08] Well, let me just say that Representative Stevenson was in my EMERGE class. She is fantastic. She's a retired U.S. Air Force colonel. She ran for state office in 2023 for attorney general and lost. But, look, a lot of people on the Republican side who were saying they're going to run for the seat, like Daniel Cameron, have also run for statewide office and lost. That's the other part of his legacy that I can't wait to see fought out in the primary. It's all the people he supports who just gain fail upwards. They lose in a primary, they lose in one election, so he just slots them in somewhere else as opposed to taking the feedback that maybe they're not the best candidates available. So we'll see. I wonder if Matt Bevin will resurface. We'll see what happens in the Republican primary. I don't know if Representative Stevenson has cleared the field, but it was smart for her to come out so early. I can tell you that much.

Beth [00:10:54] So we'll watch that race. We also know that while Mitch McConnell is not a populist, we do have a form of populism in our other senator, Rand Paul. And he has made news this week because he is against the budget resolution that the Senate passed. He was the only Republican senator to vote against it. He is very much for DOGE. In fact, he would like to see the Trump administration bring to Congress a $500 billion rescission package to formally withdraw spending Congress previously authorized so that what DOGE is doing will stick.

Sarah [00:11:27] Listen, one of my favorite things about Rand Paul is how miserable he probably makes Mitch McConnell, especially when he was in leadership, because he is consistent. Listen, I don't like Rand Paul, but on the budget stuff, he's consistent. He's like we spend too much. Period. It's got to end. And so when they are doing smoke and mirrors and saying, oh well, we are going to do this budget but we're not actually going to fix the deficit, he votes against it. He is ideologically consistent on that fact, which doesn't make any sense to me why he's all about DOGE because that's not getting anywhere close to that. He's got to know that. I know he does. That's a part that doesn't make any sense to me.

Beth [00:11:59] Well, so let's talk about what is DOGE accomplishing? What is it not accomplishing? What are the goals here? Where are we in general? Next up, we're going to talk about the money. Sarah, I was thinking about how I would have done an outline for this conversation a year ago. And when I realized is that I would have gone right to where are the votes in Congress? How is that fight shaping up? And I think that what I am trying to incorporate in my learning about politics is that you have to start with how the economy feels. It is impossible to get people riled up about a budget passing Congress if you are not starting with "Hey, the eggs are still really expensive."

Sarah [00:12:51] Well, that's so interesting to me. I can't find a consistent through line between people's feeling about the economy and their feeling about government spending. I hope it goes without saying there is absolutely no through line with actual members of Congress, particularly in the Republican Party. But I think maybe you're right. Like when people feel the economy is struggling and there's just not enough money available, then they start to get nervous about the government not having enough money as well. So maybe that's the connective tissue there.

Beth [00:13:32] I think that that's true. I also think there's a sense that the government spends so much money and none of it helps me and it just fuels support for things like DOGE. I think there is an abiding sense throughout the public right now that I have to manage my personal budget in a way that's so different than what the government does. And what the government does isn't even helping, so why is it such a mess?

Sarah [00:13:59] Yeah. Why are you guys wasting money on x, y, z? Why are you sending money abroad if I still am struggling to pay my bills? And that's definitely true. There's a lot of exhaustion around higher prices, particularly in the lower to middle income brackets. I wrote a really concerning statistic that you're seeing more and more missed payments among businesses with a higher interest rates, that there's a lot of default going on among businesses, not just among everyday Americans. And so I think that sense that why are we struggling and you're wasting money on x, y, z is for sure a part of it.

Beth [00:14:43] And I think that the income disparity-- people don't love the term income inequality, but I think that they are very invested in the feeling of it. So I noticed in my community right now a growing number of Cybertrucks. People know how expensive those trucks are. I think it's really hard to have in your face in so many ways that there are folks who are spending lots and lots of money. And then people who are really, really strained in their budget. I was just as I was looking at news this morning making notes of how does the economy feel kind of stories. And so I was seeing like Starbucks is laying off workers and cutting some of its drinks from the menu. And that's the kind of thing that really adds to that feeling. Joann fabric is going out of business. Costco and Trader Joe's in some places are limiting how many eggs you can buy. I think that's even worse than prices being high. When you start to feel that sense of scarcity around things.

Sarah [00:15:40] Well, and I think the other undercurrent to all of this is the sense that this is going to get worse before it gets better. Not just with grocery prices and bird flu, which everybody is an expert on, Beth. Congrats. I think that your morning on egg prices has really spread among the American people. And so that sense around every day prices staying high, real estate is still not moving because of higher interest rates. And then I don't know in your community, but I feel like more and more of the conversation around artificial intelligence is starting to bubble up and people are thinking, how is this going to affect my job? Am I going to have a job? Particularly as you hear about layoffs at Meta because they're going to be using artificial intelligence more. So you've got this everyday situation, mid-range situation, and then this macro situation with artificial intelligence all contributing to the fact. We sat down with Elizabeth over at Fearless Finance, and she's like, "I'm asking everyone like, how recession proof are you? How are you thinking about if if things change dramatically?" And again as we said before, then you contribute the millions of federal workers who really prop up our middle class, either getting fired and rehired more than once and or just living in this limbo of what's going to happen next. I mean, that all contributes to a sense of unease.

Beth [00:17:11] And health care costs are going up, and states are now having to look at raising premiums for state workers and public employees. Even the good news is tough news to the artificial intelligence comment that you made. Apple is planning to put half $1 trillion in the United States, which will amount to hiring 20,000 people. Half a trillion of investment and 20,000 people are going to be hired. I'm thrilled that they're going to be 20,000 people with jobs at Apple. I'm sure those will be good jobs. But that's not a lot of jobs for a half a trillion investment. And it really underscores, I think, the anxiety that is created even outside of the federal government with these changes, because you can't watch this and believe that it's not going to continue outside of government, that it's not going to reverberate everywhere. And we're adding a whole lot of people to the labor market.

Sarah [00:18:07] So you lay all that down and then you start to have headlines about funding the government. The government funding runs out in March. We're not through the budget process. None of this is going to fix the deficit. People understand the deficit. Like my dad and I had this conversation. He was like, "Well, are you going to cash the $5,000 check if Elon sends it to you." And I said, "That's ridiculous. We spend more on debt than we do on the military and he's going to send $5,000 to every American." He was like, "Yeah, that really is messed up when you think about it." I'm like, "Yeah, it is. Everybody can agree on that."

Beth [00:18:43] Also, not every American. Five thousand dollars to the households that pay more in taxes than they receive back. So the math on those DOGE dividends is $400 billion going out to 79 million households. There are a lot more than 79 million households in the United States. If you make under $40,000 a year on average, you are ending up not really paying taxes. So you're not going to get $5,000 from DOGE. So that's the other thing. A lot of this, if you go one layer down from the headline, sounds really different. I think that is the summary of what's happening with DOGE right now. One layer down from the headline, you go, "Wait a second. I don't know that this is that helpful." Even still, 72% of registered voters, according to a poll released yesterday, think that this is a good idea. They think DOGE is doing good work.

Sarah [00:19:41] Well, I don't even think it's like one layer down. There's just two simultaneous conversations happening because they have purposely obfuscated their goal. Is the goal efficiency? Is the goal to make the government more efficient, to cut wasteful programs and departments and positions? Or is the goal to actually address the deficit and balanced budget (all caps, exclamation point) as coming from the Truth Social post? Because I do think Americans are more than happy. It's almost like there's a shout in Florida every time they find something stupid, even though I don't know why guys. That's us. That's not somebody else out there. That's us. Like the federal government is us. We are the committee. And so every time there's like this hahaha, see, I just want to be like that shouldn't make you feel better. It should make you feel worse. But whatever. So I think there's a delight every time they dig at something dumb and prance it out and be like-- and there's lots of dumb things. There's lots of dumb programs and positions and spending inside the federal government. There just is. It happens. I don't think it's nefarious. I just think it is a product of the size of our federal government. Okay. So every time they trot that out, people were like, "Yeah, I knew it." They love that stuff. That's why that stuff gets so much play in the media before he ever came along. That's a high payoff, high click through rate story.

Beth [00:21:10] That's why Rand Paul does his Festivus airing of the grievances and the rest of the things that he thinks... Because I do want to push back for just a second and say dumb is in the eye of the beholder and depends on what the beholder knows. So some of these things that come out sound really dumb, but if you got into it a little bit you might still think it's dumb and wasteful, but you might at least see how it came to be. Or when it first happened, why it happened. And then people started relying on it happening again. And whole organizations were built on this funding that sounds dumb. And so even fixing a dumb thing that everyone could agree is dumb, which is really hard, disrupts a whole lot of people's livelihoods and status quo. And that's why doing this so recklessly to me is such a problem.

Sarah [00:21:57] But I also think we have to knowledge that some are dumb, even if you dig at them. Like a DEI initiative among pest management. What are we doing? Some of them are just dumb. There's not anything you could tell me that would think, yes, this is the top priority of our federal government as we deal with high interest rates and low housing stock and bird flu. You know what I mean? So I think some of it we don't need to fight all of it. Some of it we need to say, yeah, you know what? That's right. There's a lot of room for that. There's a lot of room to cut superfluous programs and positions. There is absolutely. Just like do I believe that there are thousands and thousands of federal employees that never come in and never email and that's what the email was meant to do? No. But do I think that there are some federal employees that the positions are not full time positions? Let me say that as kindly as I can. Yeah, of course I do. It's a too big of a government for that not to be true.

[00:22:55] It's just too big of an organization for that not to be true. It's run by human beings. They're fallible. So I think that one part of the strategy presses a button for people. And, look, I think the hard truth we need to think about is as long as they're trotting that stuff out, they'll have enough political capital to coast on. That's what's hard. There's enough Psychological fuel inside those wasteful spending, blah, blah, blah. Whether they're trotting them out honestly or not, whether there's more to it or not, there's just enough there to fuel their fire enough that they're not really being held to account even though every article I read points out that, look, 86% of our budget is defense, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. We are an insurance company with an army. Until we do something about that, we will have a deficit. We will spend $3 billion more a day than we take in. Period. Full stop. Elon's not touching that. He's not touching it. And so I don't know how to focus on the somewhat articulated goal that they are not getting anywhere close to reaching. And the secondary co-existing goal that fuels people psychological anger at the federal government.

Beth [00:24:22] If I had to name what I think is the driving goal from Donald Trump for DOGE, it is to be a sustained public relations campaign. Because you're right, these headlines pull at something real in people. Elon Musk is a character and gets a lot of media. And so this to me is part of that promises made, promises kept vibe that Trump wants to have out there. And he doesn't have to focus on the details at all. And even if they are firing and unfiring and semi firing and all the things, that just keeps the conversation flowing around what is really a tiny piece of the federal government even as, two things are true at once, it is enormously impactful for the people who work in these agencies and the people who depend on these agencies, and that's a lot of people. But I think that they really see this as a way to give the press something to do. And the real power around the money is in Congress. And that is where having the press occupied with DOGE is super valuable. It takes some pressure off Congress. If you are paying attention to Congress right now, I don't know about you, Sarah, the House seems kind of lost to me.

Sarah [00:25:43] Here's the thing. This is where Rand Paul and I align. It's a pain for me to say that, but it's just the reality. You don't need to pay attention to Congress right now. You could have paid attention to Congress for the last 10 years and know that they have failed repeatedly at this process. We never got the appropriation bills for the last fiscal year. That's why we have to fund the government with these continuing resolutions that run out, and then we have to fight and then it runs out, and then we have to fight because they never pass the appropriation bills as required by law. They just fail and fail and this is both parties. Let me say this as clearly as I can. This is both parties. Both parties know that we will continue to run a massive deficit until we address the fact that we are an insurance company with an army.

[00:26:41] Nobody wants to do it because it's painful and it's hard, and it requires really powerful leadership. Now, what I see right now in Congress is no leadership. Mike Johnson is not a leader. Just because he's managed to hang on by hitching his star to Donald Trump's apple cart does not mean that he's a leader, and that's what this requires. This requires some real hard leadership, and he's not going to do it. He's not going to do it. And so one bill, two bill, three bill, four, who cares? Like you're not going to do it. You have really conflicting coalitions within your party. You have a tiny majority and you have Democrats who are about to revolt and say you're not getting anything done without us. So it's a mess, but it's a mess long, long, long, long time in the making.

Beth [00:27:34] Yeah. I think if you look at DOGE and see the hollowing out of the executive branch, Congress has done that to itself over a longer period of time. And this is their primary responsibility. It is the apex of their power, and they kick it to an emergency every few months because an emergency is the only way they can get votes to just keep the lights on. And it's really sad. So the House has a lot of different ambitions just within the Republican caucus, and they have a one seat majority. They are stalling on confirming Elise Stefanik to be the U.N. representative because they need her vote so badly to try to get the budget done. And the reason that the budget is so important to them, besides the possibility of a government shutdown, is they want to do Trump's main agenda through the reconciliation process so they don't have to have 60 votes in the Senate for things like massively beefing up border security. Because reconciliation is supposed to be a finesse of the budget that has already been passed, but they got to pass the budget first. And the competing priorities within the Republican caucus have people today, when they're supposed to vote on this, still floating different possibilities about where you can find $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and a trillion and a half dollars in spending cuts.

Sarah [00:29:08] Because we are in a dangerous situation with our spending, particularly with the deficit. So there's this idea called the Ferguson rule, which is that debt service should not exceed defense spending. Now, listen, I want to say something. We aren't the only ones with this problem. We are not the only ones with this problem, okay? But we have now violated that rule. We are spending more to pay our debts than we are spending on our military. So now we're an insurance company and a debtor with an army. It's unsustainable. It's unsustainable. And they can't put together a vision of the future because they're too busy, first, cleaning up the mess from fiscal year 2024 with the March government funding that's about to come due because they never pass the appropriations so we're just kicking the ball down the hill. So that's what we got to do first. We got to actually fund the government.

[00:30:14] Then they're doing fiscal year 2025 that ends in the end of September anyway. In theory, if everything was running on time, they would be putting together their budget priorities for fiscal year 2026 that would begin in October of this year. We are so far behind. We are ignoring everything. Even these trillion dollars in cuts, which you know what? This is an unpopular opinion, but good on them for at least bringing up Medicaid. Do I agree with maybe how they would do these cuts? I don't. But at least putting one of the biggest spending programs on the table for discussion is at least intellectually honest. Now, Donald Trump isn't intellectually honest because he said, "We're going to balanced budget without touching Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security and we're going to spend more on defense." How? Do you do math?

Beth [00:31:06] And cut taxes.

Sarah [00:31:07] And cut taxes and extend the previous tax cuts. Again, I'm not a math person. I went to law school, but I understand that math and it doesn't math.

Beth [00:31:17] Just to put some numbers around this. The interest on our debt right now is $3 billion a day. I think one of the things we have to consider is that the government is not really an insurance company with an army. It's an insurer, a forever insurer, with an army. Insurance doesn't work. If the idea is something catastrophic happens and you will make whole forever and ever. And that's what these programs are, especially now that people are living so much longer. Medicare and Social Security are not even insurance anymore because they pay out forever. It's all annuities. Maybe you could put it that way, but it's just not going to work forever. And so anybody who says they're going to fix these problems has to get serious about changing those programs and that will be unpopular. But you would have to do that thoughtfully. And that is what the administration at this point seems unwilling to do. And by the way, that is Congress's job. Congress is responsible for those programs.

[00:32:24] Congress is the only way to change them in any respect. Members of Congress need to be working on long term solutions, and some of them are still mostly around the margins. But touching these programs in any way has been considered so toxic for so long that they just keep allowing this debt to accumulate. But it doesn't matter. Elon Musk can hit $2 trillion in cuts, and it will not get us almost anywhere on our debt. And I don't want to be flippant about that in a way that's unwise either. I don't want to say if a program has been cut that cost $3 billion a year. I think it's wrong to talk about that as a drop in the bucket. Even though it is a drop in the bucket in terms of the big picture, $3 billion a year is still a lot of money. And I don't think we're going to convince taxpayers like, well, that is ridiculous. Who cares about $3 billion a year? That's the attitude that gets us to a place like this. So I want to be careful and hold everything together. I do just want to see Congress get serious about the main thing. We're majoring in the minors right now to continue a theme that we've been talking about lately. Around the money, we are majoring in the minors.

Sarah [00:33:41] Well, and the reporting bothers me because it's back to the polarization. It's back to, well, now MAGA is the place where you find all the entitlement spending. It's the red states that take in the most money from these programs. I didn't like it when it was what's the matter with Kansas? Maybe it's because I live in a red state and at the end of the day you're talking about my fellow citizens. But I think the way people do that, it is relevant to the political calculus. Like Steve Bannon was like a lot of MAGA is on Medicaid, even though I'd like to take an axe to it, we can't. I guess I appreciate the honesty there, but I don't like the way that conversation breaks down. I don't like when I see those like, well, California sends out money, Mississippi takes it all in. The deficit matters to all 50 states. This matters to all of us. We are the committee. It will impact blue states and red states. It matters. And so the idea that we're too busy, we're like the spider man circle. We're all pointing at each other in the circle of spider-mans.

[00:34:49] There's a big debate within the caucus right now about the SALT deductions, which matters a lot to swing district Republicans and blue states because they have higher property values. And they want that to go away even though it should stay. I'm saying it. It should stay. That should stay. We should cap the amount of state and local tax deductions. I don't care if it hurts blue states more, and I don't care if Medicaid hits red states more. We need to talk about these things because they matter to all of us, and the math matters to all of us and math is math. And so whether you live in a red state or a blue state or how much Medicaid you take in. And so I hate the way we break this down and do this sort of like polarization dance, and you're a dummy and you take in much, we don't owe you this. I'm just like we're all of the committee guys. If Social Security goes bankrupt, it matters no matter where you live.

Beth [00:35:40] And we're running out of accounting tricks to make it work. I think that's the pressure that is starting to accumulate because none of these problems are new. Ross Perot was talking about this when we were kids, none of these problems are new. But the urgency, I think, is heightening because of that amount of interest that we're accumulating on the debt and because there's not money to keep moving around. Part of the problem with the way that Trump and Elon Musk are talking about these issues right now, I can't remember who used this phrase, but they're spending the same dollar more than once. DOGE is going to cut this and we're going to do the dividends. But and we're going to pay down the debt, and we're going to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent. Well, you can't spend that dollar more than one time.

Sarah [00:36:25] We're going to pay all of it with tariffs. Every single one is going to be paid for by tariffs.

Beth [00:36:29] Right. Plus child care for everybody right. There's just a sense that all of this money is going to fix all of the problems. And when you dig into the details again fixing the problem really gets at those big programs that are the drivers of most of the deficit every year.

Sarah [00:36:50] Well, because it's not even accounting tricks; we're just at the end of the era of cheap money. The interest rates have gone up. They don't seem to be going down any time soon. Every time the stock market gets a little bit more feedback that the Fed's not going to come in and save us and drop those interest rates back down to 1%, everything bottoms out. But how many times you guys got to hear this? It's not happening. We're not going back to that era. We condensed too much. We put too many eggs in one basket particularly to like seven companies that make up basically our entire economy. God help us if there's any sort of bubble around artificial intelligence or cryptocurrency or any of these places where we have way too much money in one place. I used to be interested in Modern Monetary theory because I've heard my whole life this story about the deficit. But my whole life has been occupied by and large, particularly my adult existence inside this political system, by historically low interest rates.

[00:37:52] That's what changes everything. Once the interest rates go up, they apply to the U.S. government just like they do everybody else. We're like lobsters in the pot. The water is being slowly turned up, the temperature is being slowly turned up, and everybody knows it and everybody feels it, but it's almost happening too slowly. Now, I think that DOGE, whatever its objective, is upending so many things at once that the water could get hot in a way that everybody feels it. We're already seeing anger at town halls and even GOP congressmen being like, oh, wait. And, look, they were supposed to pass some of this reconciliation already in the House to keep on Mike Johnson's very ambitious schedule for this big, beautiful bill by April and they're not. So I think the way in which they have moved so quickly and so sloppily within the Trump administration, particularly DOGE, just shows that they don't have a vision for the economy. Besides what we talked about at the beginning, that people over a certain amount of income just keep getting richer and richer and richer. And these entitlement programs continue to spin this out of the of House and home.

Beth [00:39:11] This is the trouble, right? Because public pressure is mounting, but not in the direction of addressing entitlement programs.

Sarah [00:39:18] No.

Beth [00:39:19] DOGE is kind of a 2025 manifestation of tea party sentiment. This has all been around for a while. It is just doing what Rand Paul has been doing forever, talking about forever. Doing it instead of just talking about it. So that's the difference. But that public pressure building in response to it is no keep things. Keep things. Don't cut jobs. Don't cut programs that we depend on. Keep things. Where is the impetus going to come from to get at the big problems in a way that speaks to the motivators of members of Congress. I think some of them feel this pressure. I think probably all of them feel it to one degree or another. I just don't know if they feel it in an intensity that competes with the intensity of either speak to my base or help me get through a tough election next time.

Sarah [00:40:17] Well, look, to the Democratic Party of it all, there is a way, I believe, to deal with the deficit and these spending programs with tax increases. That's the other part of math. You don't have to subtract, but you have to add. But they won't do that. We've taken the beating. We've let the narrative live that the Democratic Party just wants to raise taxes and raise taxes and raise taxes. Listen, at the end of the day, some of this lays at the American people's feet because we don't want taxes but we want our entitlement programs untouched. Again, the math doesn't math. So that required leadership from the Democratic Party that they've been unwilling to give. They should step up and say, "No there are rich people in this country that are not paying their share of taxes." All of us aren't paying our fair share of taxes. We need to get right with if we want these programs untouched, then we have to talk about tax increases.

[00:41:22] We have to talk about paying more in taxes. You're going to get something for it. Because that's it, it all builds on the inefficiency. Well, you want me to pay more in taxes so you can pay for this study on the mating habits of white crabs in Russia? You know what I mean? That's the problem. They're like, "Well, I feel like you're asking me to pay for a government that isn't working for me." And there's a narrative here that has been allowed to grow and feed and perpetuate and it's toxic. And it's all a part of our distrust of this institution. And that's probably at the heart of so much of this conversation around our spending, because it gets to how you feel about the institution.

Beth [00:42:12] I love that example that you just gave because this morning I was reading about how Ozempic came from research on Gila monsters and lizard venom. So all those pieces that you think aren't working for you maybe are working for you in the long term in ways that you don't recognize, and that's tough. I do hear Democrats talking about the wealthy not paying their fair share in taxes. I think that that has been part of overall a losing electoral message. I think any real, serious, effort to tackle our financial house in the United States right now is going to have to consist of both increased revenue and cuts in spending. I think if the Democratic Party wants to meet the moment here and work on its brand and take some risks, it would be a great time for them to come out with it with their own proposal of how to get at Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

[00:43:09] It's going to have to be done; so don't you want your people working on it and your minds in the room and your party helping set that agenda? I would like to see that happen. Because if Democrats could propose something serious that people could really follow and understand, even though it's scary and will be unpopular with some constituencies, I think that could start to change the view of what the party is and what it represents while simultaneously making Republicans look a little silly in the way that they're dealing with the financial issues.

Sarah [00:43:42] Well, sneak peek for Friday, we're going to talk about Javier Milei in Argentina, who has done a lot of this. Some really hard truths and some tough cuts in Argentina that he's done and maintained some of his popularity with just being honest with people. So it's not impossible. We're going to talk about that a little bit more on Friday show.

Beth [00:44:14] We always end our show talking about something Outside of Politics. And Sarah I'm tired of snow days. I can tell you that my kids have been home more this winter than I can remember in the past few years.

Sarah [00:44:26] Yeah, we had three snow days last week and maybe one or two in January. I love snow, so I have a higher threshold for this. But I also just got an email of like 500 million missing assignments over the NTI days. So I'm like I don't know about this NTI situation. Like a few worksheets in the morning to kind of keep them focused and on track don't bother me. This is probably a bigger problem with online curriculum than it is NTI, which stands for non-traditional instruction for those of you who don't use that acronym in your home states. But it's the death of the snow day. Nobody's waking up in the morning and checking the local news to see the little scroll at the morning. They get a text message the night before that says you don't go to school tomorrow, but you got to do some homework.

Beth [00:45:11] So our district has just announced that we are not going to have any more NTI days. We had only had one because when we had the snow after Christmas, kids didn't have any materials at home to work with to do non-traditional instruction. They get back to school, they start to bring their Chromebooks home just in case and then we get one of those days. And then we have another snow day and they're like this is just going to be a traditional snow day. And what I'm piecing together is that the community has just said this is too hard, and the community consisting both of families and teachers, because our district was requiring teachers to come into the school building on NTI days.

Sarah [00:45:52] Wait, what?

Beth [00:45:55] Yes. And conduct school from school just with students at home?

Sarah [00:46:00] No, no, no. Okay, so we're using the same acronym, but we're talking about very different things. So when we have NTI in Paducah Independent School systems, what that looks like is Felix comes home with six worksheets from all his different subjects. He does not get online. He just does the worksheets and the English teacher will be like write a story about what you did in the snow. Very simple. Middle school they get on a Teams meeting with the teachers from home as well for like five minutes and then within Teams they have these different mostly worksheets to do. And then Griffin I still don't think has many online meetings. They just assign stuff in Teams and they do it from home. Are they like sitting in classes?

Beth [00:46:52] I think a lot of different things are happening. My school district is one of the biggest in Kentucky, so I think a lot of different things are happening. My kids both had specific times they were to log in to Google classrooms. And they weren't on for very long because they would just typically get an assignment and move on. But they were trying to do that with a schedule that included things like their special classes like art and music, things that just do not work at home at all. I think there were big problems for teachers feeling unsafe driving in the weather to do this. I think everybody agrees that it's ineffective. Nobody wants to live the Covid classroom days again and so we're just going to add to the end of the school year. To me, this school year has just been yet another reason that we need to rethink the entire school calendar.

[00:47:44] The winters are going to be more wintry I think from now on. I think the summers are going to be more summery. What was hot is going to be hotter. What was cold is going to be colder. What was rainy is going to be flooding. And so we need to rethink our whole system, I believe. I'm thrilled that my daughters are not going to haul their Chromebooks home every single day, especially for an elementary student. Those things are heavy in their backpacks. I think that's not good for them. I think that getting them on at a certain time, even though we both work from home, was a pain. I can't imagine if I worked outside my house and my kids were here all day, and they were supposed to log in at 9:07 for whatever class. So I think that it's probably wise to stop doing this, but I don't think the answer is just stop doing it and then let's tack days on to the end of the year forever. I think we need a re-envisioning of the calendar.

Sarah [00:48:35] Yeah. No, I don't think it's all bad. Felix's math teacher was like, we're going to have a quiz coming up. Here's your unit review. So sit down and do your unit review. That's fine to me for a snow day. The specific time logging on is the problem. To me, sending home materials, telling them to keep up with their reading page goals and to review this unit, to me that's fine. It wasn't a big deal. I think that's important, especially if you have a week of snow days. You can really lose a lot of instructional time. You're still losing instructional time, but at least you're not putting everybody back on the track. That's a lot of work. So I think that just abandoning the log in time-- send them home with some work to do, but abandon the log in times. And there should be plenty of ways, even if they don't come home with worksheets, that they can send it to you. It's 2025. But I do not like tacking it on at the end of the year particularly because I'm going on vacation the last day of school, which I don't usually do but for a lot of reasons we're doing it that way this year. But yeah I know people start jobs, people go to camps. Like Felix if he was doing session one of his diabetes camp, he'd be leaving like four days after school. That doesn't work.

Beth [00:49:46] Jane has a summer job lined up this year and we are going to school past her start date. So there's a lot of things are going to have to be figured out. I wish that we could accept that kids learn in all kinds of circumstances. And so I agree. Just read at home for the day, make a recipe. I think there are lots and lots of ways that we could say, well, they learned something today. And perhaps they learn more than they'll get if they're in a classroom on June 1st, when you know everybody's going to be well and truly done with the year. So I am opposed to winter in general, but specifically this year. And we wanted to tell those of you who, like me, are really ready for some different weather about some fun things that we have coming up. And Sarah, you have one coming up very soon.

Sarah [00:50:37] Yeah, I'm not opposed to winter, but I am in favor of travel and Common Ground Pilgrimages, who we are partnering with on a trip together in October to Switzerland around Frankenstein-- unfortunately, that trip is sold out, guys. But Common Ground Pilgrimages came to us and said, "Hey, you want to do some more trips?" And we were like, "Do people say no to you? Because I certainly wouldn't." So I am doing a trip around the most important book ever written. Yeah, I'm comfortable with that. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. So I am going to England from September 22nd to 26. Now, this is an alignment, guys. It's very exciting because it is the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth. They're doing all kinds of stuff in England. The Jane Austen Center is having a festival. They're going to do like balls. Bath is doing all this stuff.

[00:51:33] And the big festival with the Jane Austen Center is like the 12th through the 26th, so you can go to that on either side of this trip. We're going to be in Bakewell, England, at the Rutland Arms Hotel, which is lovely. I'm so excited. So I'll be leading the trip. We did one of these trips in November around Taylor Swift lyrics for Folklore and Evermore and I tried to describe it on Substack. It's like the best book club discussion you've ever had partnered with the best English class you've ever had, partnered with the best therapy session you've ever had all rolled up into one. We were really breaking through in some of these conversations and we were just talking about Taylor Swift lyrics. Can you imagine what's possible around Pride and Prejudice?

Beth [00:52:23] I think there what Common Ground is really beautiful because they say, hey, however you frame up the world, whether you believe in God or whether you believe in ethics and kindness, whatever your big picture frame is, we can all come to a text and ask that text questions about what we're doing here and what makes a good life and what my part in the universe is. And so these trips are an opportunity to not just do the book club and the English class, as you said, Sarah, but to put it in that bigger picture context of like who am I? And what are we all doing here? And so I think that's really exciting and I know that you're going to have a great time in England talking about Pride and Prejudice, because I've heard you talk about Pride and Prejudice forever in connection with some of those big picture questions.

Sarah [00:53:19] Well, isn't the stat that Yesterday is the most covered song of all time? I feel like Pride and Prejudice is like the book equivalent. There are one million like sequels, prequels, versions. I mean, Bridget Jones Diary, version of Pride and Prejudice, guys. It's a rich text and has shown itself to be a rich text over hundreds of years. And so, you know what? Vanessa has built a Common Ground Pilgrimages with these sacred reading practices where you come together and say, what is this saying to me? What am I hearing from it? What can I share? How can we build on what you're hearing from it together? That was my favorite part of the Taylor Swift lyrics. We would do small groups and we do big class discussions and we would work through it in different ways. And plus the just the trip itself is my favorite part of traveling. There's a lot of walking, there's a lot of eating, there's a lot of reading. Where's the beef? What's it what is there to disagree with there?

[00:54:18] So my trip to England in September around Pride and Prejudice is live. You can sign up for the trip. If you couldn't make the trip to Switzerland with Frankenstein work, good news. You have another opportunity now with this trip to England to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth, which is the number one recommended place for The New York Times. Fifty Two places to visit in 2025. This will be my third year in a row, Beth, to go to the number one spot. Last year was the total solar eclipse. Great first pick. What a phenomenal experience that was for all of us. And the year before that it was London because of the coronation. Also, great pick. So I didn't want to break my strike. This works out perfectly. And even more excitingly, you're going to do a trip, too. Which I thought they were going to roll out sooner, but now that I know why we're waiting until March it makes it even better.

Beth [00:55:18] Yes, you cannot book a trip with me yet. You will have to wait for March in honor of the March sisters because I will be taking a group to Concord, Massachusetts to talk about Little Women in November. I'm going to come back from Frankenstein and roll into Little Women, and I think that's good. I think that that's a nice progression for me.

Sarah [00:55:38] Also, Concord, Massachusetts is on the list of 52 places to visit in 2025.

Beth [00:55:43] It's going to be fantastic. The bits that I am learning about the venue and the plans from Vanessa at Common Ground and Courtney are excellent. Look, they do this really well. These trips are beautifully put together. That's part of why it's always easy to say let's partner because I know what a team of professionals they are. And so I would love to see you there, too. I know that not everyone can probably swing three trips with us to talk about books this year, but if you can, I hope that you will. We're going to look at the theme of grief in connection with Little Women, which I'm really excited about. I'm just been thinking a lot about how much grief informs so much of life and how much beauty there can be in really understanding and walking alongside grief instead of fighting it. And so I'm really looking forward to those conversations and plus just Little Women. There's just a there's a lot to enjoy there. I've always really identified with Beth for a number of reasons, and I'm excited to build this trip around her in some ways.

Sarah [00:56:43] And we will be looking at the theme of status and self through the lens of Pride and Prejudice. Status informs so much of the social hierarchy within all of Jane Austen's books. And I think that it's easy to just roll your eyes and discard it even though we have talked about repeatedly on Pantsuit Politics, particularly after our second book, that status informs so much of our lives, to how we think about ourselves, how we think about our roles within our families and our friend groups and our communities. And so I'm so excited to look at it through those lenses. And it's just going to be so fun and I wish we were going right now.

Beth [00:57:20] So more to come on my trip. Sarah's trip will have the information about in the notes today. You can sign up right now if you are feeling the spirit move you. And we'll be back with you on Friday, as Sarah said, to pick up where we left off in the money conversation but from a very different angle. Again, if you enjoyed today's conversation, we really hope you'll share it with your people. Share your thoughts with us. We'll be back with you on Friday. Until then, have the best week available to you.