Welcome to Beg to Differ, the Bulwerks Weekly Roundtable discussion featuring civil conversation across the political spectrum, from center left to center right.

I'm Mona Charon, syndicated columnist and policy editor at Bullwork. I'm joined by our regulars Bill

Galston of the Brookings Institution in the Wall Street Journal, Linda Chavez of the Niskanin Center, and Damon Linker of the week.

We are delighted this week to welcome a special guest, Bill Crystal, who is a founder of the

Bullwork and one of America's leading public intellectuals.

So welcome one and all, delighted to be with you again after a one week hiatus. We appreciated hearing from all of those listeners who said they

missed us. We missed you too. All right to begin let's start with getting

through the winter.

It is at this moment the figure is 273,000 Americans have died of coronavirus.

There were yesterday 2,798 alone on Wednesday of this week.

So we've had lots of warnings.

Now, in addition to that, the relief that was passed in March

is running out.

So Bill Crystal, what do you make of the,

basically let's call it what it is,

the climb down by Democrats willing to accept far less for a package than they had been talking

about before.

They had been using the figure of 2 trillion.

Now they're talking about I think it's nine hundred

million, nine hundred and eight billion sorry nine hundred eight billion.

Yeah you're so out of touch to be talking about millions.

I'm sorry, yes, I don't know what came over me.

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