Yesterday, President Biden met with congressional leadership to talk about this issue that everyone

in Washington is freaking out about the X-Date.

I love one like the economic nerds give us a fun term to work with.

That's Jeff Stein.

He's an economics reporter for the post and he's been reporting on the X-Date.

That's the deadline for the US government to raise the debt limit.

If that doesn't happen, then the US will default on its debt and that is a huge deal.

At the risk of sounding alarmist, if the US were to default on its debt, we would be looking

at potentially millions of federal workers furloughed, social security and Medicare recipients,

not getting critical life-saving payments, a stock market collapse, an economic recession,

a really scary set of doomsday scenarios.

The X-Date is June 1st and as we barrel towards that deadline, economists are trying to figure

out exactly what would happen if we miss it because the US has never failed to pay its bills.

Well, except for that one time.

There's like the war of 1812, they didn't pay it for a week and I gotta be like,

it's so annoying.

People will email you, it's not unprecedented, like James Madison.

Okay, since James Madison hasn't happened, but for real.

We would really be an uncharted territory never before in the modern history of the country

as the US government failed to make a payment and that failure could really imperil the

global economy and the US economy and we just don't know because this has never happened

before.

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