Welcome to Deconstructed. I'm John Schwartz, a writer at The Intercept, and I am substituting

for Ryan Grimm this week. Today, we are going to be talking about the federal debt limit

and the bizarre, nonsensical, pointless catastrophe it is on the verge of causing. It seems

like it can't be that interesting until you understand that because of it, you may momentarily

lose your job and your parents may not get their social security payments and your cousins

won't have enough money to buy food. So that is actually pretty compelling. And speaking

of social security, that's what this makes me think of. The most important political

experience of my life was when, as a youth, just by weird accident, I learned a ton about

social security. Before that, I believed all the social security hype and propaganda

about how it was going to collapse and that nobody my age would ever see a check and stuff

like that. But then I learned that this was all complete nonsens. There is no reason to

worry about social security. It will be fine. And that's why I was then prepared for

the Iraq war because all the same people who had been telling me about how social security

was dying were now informing me about this terrible danger of Saddam's weapons of mass

destruction. I take the fact that he develops weapons of mass destruction very seriously.

And you may recall that that did not pan out. And so that brings us to the debt limit.

The basic fact of US politics is that just as with social security and the Iraq war,

the people in charge constantly lie about everything to the degree that reality is generally

the exact opposite of what they say. We're going to be discussing this aspect of this

regarding the debt ceiling with Stephanie Kelton, who is a professor of economics and public

policy at Stony Brook University. She was a senior economic advisor to Bernie Sanders presidential

campaign in 2016 and 2020. And she is the author of the fantastic book, The Deficit Myth,

...