here is our position, mr. president, let s talk about it. and so far biden has said forget that. we ll see what happens today. to say they have not done their job is the senate does not have the votes to pass a clean debt ceiling, you need 60 votes and they don t have 60 in the senate. this is where i think president biden is going to have to negotiate with kevin mccarthy and give him something. john: when you look at the debt ceiling clock, how high is it going to go before somebody does something about spending. the key to that, you have to reform medicare, medicaid, social security. neither side is about to do that unilaterally and neither side wants to come together on it. until you come to an agreement to rein in that spending off the charts, and i remember back in the heady waning days of the clinton administration, a social security surplus of about a quarter of a trillion dollars
The latest congressional leadership proposal for a "demonstrationproject" to test Medicare reform continues a tiresome pattern ofbad federal health policy that undercuts the effectiveness ofmarket-based health care reforms. Serious Medicare reform means onething: creating a premium support financing system modeled on theFederal Employees Health Benefits Program.
i think we do need to reform medicare, social security, but you have to bring the country along to do that. that s why you don t just plop something like this out, have no conversation about it, don t make any real effort to explain to people why it s necessary. look, some of this goes back to the trump era. donald trump very clearly decided we were no longer the party of solving these problems and a lot of people have been following him ever since. but until we start getting, you know kevin mccarthy is going to say over and over again that medicare and social security are not on the table. until they actually get to the table, until you actually start seeing what that deal is going to look like, they can basically paint them with think color they want to. well, we re going to see what happens because this is just the beginning, but boy is it going up and up and up. julie, brendan, thank you so much. we ll talk again. pennsylvania senator john fetterman spent a second night in th