These are all signs of a declining empire.

And watching in Ukraine, watching this process in which the United States is pouring unheard of amounts of money into this country that's literally being blown apart by this situation and wondering to themselves, this smells, this tastes, this looks like

what every empire on the way down has always done, overreached. I'm so. I'm so glad to be joined again on Bad Faith podcast by Professor Richard Wolfe, an American Marxist economist known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis.

Professor Meredithus of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the new school.

Welcome back to the podcast, Professor Wolfe.

Thank you.

I'm real glad to be here.

All right.

There is quite the docket of things I would like for you to explain to me today.

I regret some for me that I've never taken an

economics class. I'm not the best with this, but I think this is partly why this will be an

informative episode, because I'm going to ask the questions that I'm sure many, many lay people

also have. So top of the list today is the question of the dead ceiling, as I'm sure people are aware. This has become

the singular issue for a lot of Republicans who hope to use their newfound majority in the

house to make this a painful process as it once was, what was that back in 2012, the last time we

had a big standoff around the debt ceiling.

So what we constantly hear is that the national debt is not like a bank account,

that this idea that we need to curb our spending in this kind of simplistic description

that we get oftentimes from the right is not, in fact, accurate.

However, that is the narrative that we are contending with right now.

The question is, why are we spending more than we are able to pay? Why do we keep ending up

...