Welcome to beg to differ. The bull works weekly roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum.

We range from center left, center right. I'm Mona Charen, syndicated columnist and policy editor at the bull work and I am joined by our regulars.

Bill Galston of the Brookings institution in the Wall Street Journal and Damon Linker who writes the sub-stack newsletter Eyes on the Right.

Linda Chavez is traveling this week. Our special guest is Maya McGinnis, president of the nonpartisan committee for a responsible federal budget.

And so we are going to discuss the Lord's work that Maya does of trying to be sane about an insane process.

And then we're going to have to say goodbye to Maya after the first segment and we'll get to some other topics including Israel's difficulties.

But to begin, welcome one and all. President Biden introduced his 2024 budget. These budgets themselves are for 10 years.

Maybe Maya can enlighten us about that. Why it's always that way now. But in any event, $6.9 trillion, which would include spending on all kinds of things like universal preschool, paid leave and more childcare.

As also he would raise taxes on billionaires and everybody earning more than $400,000 a year.

So when you're looking for sanity on this topic, there aren't too many places to go because if you look at this and you say this is crazy, this is a crazy amount of spending.

We are so badly in debt. What are the Republicans saying I wonder? And you find out that Republicans are saying that they're going to balance the budget over 10 years while extending the Trump tax cuts.

And they're going to do it all by cutting waste fraud and abuse and unnecessary discretionary spending.

So okay, Maya McGinnis, this is your area of specialization. Did I overstate it?

You can't even overstate it. The fiscal situation that we are in is so bad. And if that weren't bad enough situation, we all talk about so often.

The levels of polarization, which make it impossible for them to even have something resembling an adult conversation on what to do about it, is really undermining not just the economic strength of the country, but our role in the world.

But the debt situation that we face has gotten so big and so out of control, and it's really hard to imagine how we're going to turn it around.

So I am gravely concerned and desperately trying to figure out how we get to some kind of rational fiscal policy.

And all of this is in the backdrop that there's the debt ceiling we have to deal with this year. So it's going to get worse and more frantic before it gets better, I fear.

Yeah, you mentioned the debt ceiling fight, which is coming up. And in addition, we now have one more thing to layer on in case people weren't concerned enough. And that is the potential of a larger banking crisis. Talk about that for a minute.

Yeah, I mean, we are now really stuck in a three way vice between the risk of inflation, which came about because of irresponsible fiscal policies, but clearly was exacerbated by supplying chain issues and energy issues worn Ukraine, and that has been much worse than we anticipated.

The risk of recession because the Fed has to respond to the inflation is raises interest rates that could certainly put us in a recession. And now the risk of contagion because of the banking crisis.

And that leaves fiscal policy, which really did a lot of damage and hasn't done anything to make the situation better. In fact, it's made it worse exacerbated it by continuing to borrow even once inflation was there.

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