Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Wednesday, October 1st, and we're kicking off the month with a government shutdown. Before we get into that, however, if you are enjoying the breakdown, please go subscribe to it, give it a rating, give it a review, or if you want to dive deeper into the conversation, come join us on the Breakers Discord. You can find a link in the show notes or go to bit.ly slash breakdown pod. All right, friends, it's official. As of midnight last night,

the U.S. government has shut down. Democrats and Republicans failed to reach a last-minute deal on

government funding on Tuesday, leading to the first shutdown since early 2019. Hundreds of thousands of

federal workers will see their paycheck stop and government services will be suspended until a deal

is struck. While this

is the first shutdown since the last Trump administration, it's hardly an unprecedented or unexpected

occurrence. This is now the sixth shutdown since the Clinton presidency when the move was cemented

into the playbook of political brinksmanship. Similar to debt-sealing negotiations, threatening

to shut down the government has become a staple of Washington politics. Now, there are always layers to the politics, and it's often not entirely

clear which demands are genuine and which are merely a pretense for staging a big political

display. This time around, Democrat leaders are taking a stand on health care cuts. In June,

the budget slashed Medicaid spending by almost 800 billion over the coming decade.

Another provision of the budget was set to remove tax credits on health insurance premiums for millions of people. That change was set to kick off at the end of this year.

Republicans argued that these changes were purely about removing illegal migrants from

subsidized health care programs, House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a Tuesday interview,

they want to restore taxpayer-funded benefits.

American taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal aliens. We're not doing that. Below that talking point,

however, subsidies would also have been stripped away from millions of middle-income citizens.

In an interview on the steps of Congress on Tuesday, Democrat leader Maxine Waters,

rejected the idea that the party was purely fighting for health care for illegal aliens, stating, Democrats are demanding health care for everybody. Alongside the health care

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