Hey, everybody. I got a great one today, you know, for a change. And when I say that,

I don't mean to disparage any of the guests we've, we've had over the last four years. Some

are just better than others. And frankly, there are some of these where I'm not all that hot myself.

But this week, a great guest, Paul Krugman, the man is a Nobel laureate in economics.

And wouldn't you know it, we're talking about economics, specifically the debt ceiling crisis.

So we're talking about how and whether we're going to go over a disastrous cliff by defaulting.

Paul has a number of ways to avoid that.

None of them full proof, I might add.

It's scary.

I was in the Senate in 2011 when the Republicans pulled this shit.

Of course, Obama was president.

They don't pull this shit with Republican presidents.

They unanimously raised the debt ceiling three times under Trump, as did the Democrats.

But in 2011, Obama blinked, and we agreed to a package that cut spending in the middle

of the Great Recession, in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

The agreement came at the 11th hour so late that standards and poor's downgraded our

treasury bonds from AAA to AA plus, which ended up costing us billions of dollars.

But I signed on to the deal, as did every Democrat, because otherwise we would have defaulted

and gone off the cliff and possibly send the worldwide recession into a worldwide depression.

Well, we're not in a worldwide recession now, but going off the cliff in the month might

very well do that, and I'm sure there are not a small number of Republicans in the House and maybe the Senate

who would love that as long as their fingerprints aren't on it.

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