Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm your host Sarah Izger joined by Joe Nagelberg and David

French. We will be discussing the Death Stealing Fight and what budget hawkery might look like in

this new era of conservatism? Arming Ukraine, weirthing Stan and of course we'll end with some politics.

Let's dive right in. Jonah, where are we on? I don't know, the national dead, the dead ceiling. Can

you just do some level setting for us? Sure. I know that everyone always goes to me for this

kind of granular accounting and fiduciary fiscal analysis, but I did talk to Brian Reedle this week

who's my budget guy so it's a little fresher in my head. We have a lot of debt, joins and

joins at dollars a debt and every few years because Congress does things stupidly, they have to raise

the debt ceiling, which is the limit on the amount of money that the fellow government can borrow.

And since every day we borrow a couple hundred billion dollars more than we have on spending

every single day and there's actually some cool little daily reports from the treasury that sort of

say this is how much over your limit you are every day. We end up hitting the ceiling on that

ceiling. And so if you can't borrow on a daily basis that means all of a sudden you can't

meet all of your obligations. And so now apparently the day of reckoning is today and the term of art

from the treasury department is that they will use extraordinary measures. This sounds both more

scary and less scary than it should. Extraordinary measures is actually the term of art for

moving some stuff around to keep the lights on and they can do that for a little while. We don't

know how long they can do that for but the shot clock is now on. And the Republicans, there's

mixed reporting about this but I think the consensus is that Kevin McCarthy promised a bunch of people

to get voted for a speaker that he would bake a big show of protest about the debt ceiling hike

in order to claim to try to get concessions from the Biden administration to cut spending.

The problem with this is an economic matter is in a McCarthy likes to talk about how like if you

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