Building a coffee business? Serving the best Americano in town is up to you. But winning back time and growing your business, leave that to sum up. Take orders and payments anywhere with the new sum up terminal. Turn occasional customers into regulars with a free loyalty program. And with the sumup point of sale system, you'll always know when you're running low on your best selling blends. Visit sumup.co. To learn more. Hey, guys. I'm Sam Stein managing editor at the Borg. I'm joined by John Avlon. This is fun. Hey, man. How you doing? I'm good. For those who don't know, you should know by now, John. Hired me at the Daily Beast. Back together again. Really appreciate it. John's going to talk about the budget, the beautiful budget bill.

Salt, everything involved, all he wants to talk about, really. But before we get into that, subscribe to the feed, click that button, very important. All right. So, John, we've been like trying to schedule this thing for like a day and a half now because it's such a moving target. We didn't know when. We did, right? Because now we know.

Now we know.

But it was just sort of like watching it unfold.

I was just, it was, what I was struck by was how crazed the entire process felt.

At no point did we really actually see the legislative language until like a few minutes before the Rules Committee voted and then like a few hours before the whole House voted. Totally abnormal

stuff. But beyond the process, I, you know, I'm curious what you ran for office last cycle.

You're in the mix. You know the stuff. Like what did your takeaway about what the House Republicans,

especially the frontliners, decided to do here?

Look, this bill's a shit show to the extent that nobody knew what was actually in it when they voted,

and it manages to simultaneously have massive cuts that will hurt real people where they live.

I mean, there are automatic Medicare cuts that are set in here, in addition

of the Medicaid cuts, the food stamps, and everything else, but it still blows up the deficit,

hugely. And so those are the big factors. In some ways, it's the worst of all worlds. Yes,

they passed it barely, narrowly. But the fact that it simultaneously guts people who need it most, it shreds the safety net.

And, you know, keeping in mind that like 34% of people on Medicaid are kids, right?

And then it simultaneously blows up the deficit, which should codify for anybody with any doubt

who stands to get

suckered beyond the idea that Republicans stand for fiscal responsibility. We got 40 years

a test case here. Republicans only care about the deaths and the debt when Democrats are president.

But, you know, I think Jillian Ted had a great column about, you know, there's being called the

triple B bill, which is also the...

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