There's A Debt Ceiling Agreement ... For Now 01:03:14

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Kaylee, did I see on Instagram that you went to the Taylor Swift concert at MetLife Stadium? Oh my god, it was so incredible. It was life-changing.

I was like nine rows back from the stage, like in the middle of the catwalk. So she could spit on me. It was amazing. I saw her on Mother's Day, and it was also my birthday. And I was there with my 10-year-old and my sister and her nieces. And one of the surprise songs was The Best Day, which she wrote for her mom. Did you just ball? I balled. My daughter was balling. Everybody in our section was balling.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk, and I hope everyone had a nice Memorial Day weekend.

Over the weekend, the White House and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced an agreement on suspending the debt ceiling and making cuts to discretionary spending. The bill is expected to be taken up in the House on Wednesday. According to the Treasury Department, the U.S. will run out of cash to pay its bills on June 5th, meaning that the clock is ticking for the bill to pass the House, Senate, and be signed by President Biden.

We're going to talk about what's in the agreement, why polls on the debt ceiling have been straight up contradictory, and what could happen if the legislation isn't passed by next Monday.

Also, as most state legislatures wrap up business for the year, one common theme has been legislation related to sexuality and gender identity, banning transgender girls from girls' sports, transgender medical care for minors, and restricting conversations about the topics in school. We'll take a look at the range of laws and what Americans think.

Here with me to discuss is politics and tech reporter Kaylee Rogers. Hey, Kaylee. Hey, Galen. Also here with us is ABC News White House correspondent Karen Travers. Welcome to the podcast, Karen. Thanks for having me, Galen. And senior politics reporter Monica Potts. Welcome, Monica. Hi, thanks for having me, Galen. I will also add that today is a big day for you. Your book, The Forgotten Girls, is being released this very day on Tuesday when we're recording. So congratulations. How are you feeling?

Thank you. I'm excited. I'm excited for people to buy it. Awesome. Awesome. Well, we're going to have a conversation about it a little bit later in the podcast. But right now, we're going to dive right in to the drama that will unfold over the coming week. And that is the debt ceiling agreement. So, Karen, you are joining us from the White House right now. The White House. Yes.

In a small little ABC radio booth. So it may not to anyone watching along on YouTube. It probably doesn't look as glamorous as you imagine the White House looking. However, you are in fact there. Yes. So what are the outlines of the agreement that Biden and McCarthy came to?

Yeah, so this was a significant agreement that they announced Saturday night over the holiday weekend. And the big headline here is, of course, that it suspends the debt limit. And that's the big thing that, of course, both sides were working toward to get off the table the risk of this catastrophic default where the government would not be able to pay its debts. So the big thing is it suspends the debt limit through January 1st, 2025.

and also has some modest spending caps. And this was what the whole fight has been about for the past couple of weeks. The agreement keeps non-defense spending roughly flat with current levels for fiscal year 2024, and then there's an increase by 1% for 2025. So that is...

notable but modest, I think, is the word that everybody seems to be keying in on here in Washington. There are no changes to Medicaid. This agreement fully funds medical care for veterans. A couple of the things, though, that we've been talking about over the past few weeks, it does claw back about $30 billion in that unspent COVID relief fund. That was something that Republicans had wanted. It's something that the president said he would agree to.

One big concession, too, from the White House is these new work requirements. There's new SNAP eligibility requirements where it raises the age from 50 to 54 for people who now must work at least 20 hours a week to be eligible to get those food aid benefits. And that's something that progressives really did not like. They did not want the president to give an inch on that, but it is something that was worked out in the agreement.

One thing that Republicans are saying was a big concession from the White House that the White House is sort of downplaying at this point is on the student loan factor. If this bill is passed, it's going to force millions of Americans to start repaying their student loans at the end of the summer, by the end of August. Remember, the pause for the student loan repayments has been in effect because of the pandemic.

But the Education Department had already announced that those student loan repayments would resume either after a Supreme Court ruling, 60 days after that, or 60 days after June 30th, whichever came first. So essentially, this was going to happen by the end of the summer. Now it will absolutely happen by the end of the summer if this legislation is passed because it'll be codified into law. The White House hearing some grumbling about this, but they're sort of downplaying saying, look, this was inevitable.

So at the starting point, Biden said, you know, I'm not negotiating any spending cuts associated with raising or suspending the debt ceiling. You know, I want a clean raise of the debt ceiling is the words that he used. We can talk about spending later on when it comes to funding the government for the next year or whatever it may be.

Now, Republicans' opening position, the bill that they passed in the House, was cutting discretionary spending back to 2022 levels, so an actual decrease next year, and then capping increases at 1% for a decade, which, according to estimates, would save $3.2 trillion in 10 years.

So we had no spending cuts and $3.2 trillion in spending cuts. Does this bill land closer to zero or $3.2 trillion? Yeah, kind of in the middle there, if you will. But in terms of the, you know, whose position it gets closer toward, closer to the president's and the White House. But I think, like, let's step back a little bit and look at, you know, where everybody came in on this. The president for months was adamant.

that he was not even going to have a conversation about the budget or spending cuts until the debt ceiling was raised, because he felt that if there was a threat of default still out there, you couldn't have a meaningful conversation about the budget and spending cuts. So remember, he had a meeting with Kevin McCarthy earlier this year, and then they went more than three months without any engagement. And the White House, I asked them about this last week, whether they regretted not

having any conversations during that time. And they said no, because the Republicans didn't put out any budget numbers. So they said it would have been kind of useless to sit and talk with Kevin McCarthy until Republicans put something on the table. Then they did. They put out...

something close to a budget when they passed that legislation that raised the debt ceiling, but also had significant spending cuts. But it was a non-starter for the White House because the president was still insisting, I am not going to do these two things at the same time. Well, look where we ended up. He did the two things at the same time. But he was also trying to thread the needle a little bit by always saying publicly, I'm not talking about the debt ceiling. We are not talking

about whether or not to raise the debt ceiling. That is something that is going to happen. That is off the table. Default is off the table. So since I got those assurances from Kevin McCarthy, now we can talk numbers. He caved on that. That is very clear. The White House would never say that publicly. He would not say that publicly. But he certainly moved to their position by even having the conversation. Then on the actual substance of all of this, these spending cuts are

nowhere near what House Republicans were pushing for. It's nowhere close to what they passed in that original legislation a couple weeks ago, which was never going to go forward in the Senate. So, yeah, this is a win for the White House in that sense. But notably, the president over the weekend was not gloating, not taking any sort of victory lap until the numbers are counted, the votes are in, because he clearly doesn't want to do anything that could wreck any sort of fragile balance to get this across the finish line.

The thing that I'm thinking about here is this was all about we want to reduce deficit spending so we can reduce the debt. You know, both Biden and Republicans were saying, you know, we are concerned about spending too much now. OK, right now, the debt for the United States is thirty one point five trillion dollars. That's one hundred twenty percent of GDP alone.

We spend 7% of our annual budget servicing the debt, you know, paying off the interest. And especially as interest rates rise, that number is expected to go up over the next decade significantly. So we'll be increasingly spending, you know, money that we could spend on other programs servicing the debt. This was supposed to be about that. How much, you know, put Republicans and Democrats' arguments aside for a second, like how much did we actually do to change that situation?

Yeah, probably not a whole lot when you look at how modest this all ended up being when the numbers are crunched. The president's top economic advisor, Lael Brainard, was on Good Morning America on Tuesday, and she was asked about the impact to the economy on this. And she used the phrase rounding error, just saying, you know, this isn't really a big enough of a deal to have a significant impact on the economy. And I think they're trying to say that as assurances of, you know,

this isn't so seismic in terms of the cuts that will be happening here. But I think that that's notable to hear the White House essentially trying to downplay this as a

rounding error. To your point, it's not necessarily going to have such a big impact then on the bigger issue that both sides did say they wanted to actually have some tangible progress on, cutting the deficit. Yeah. Kayleigh and Monica, I'm curious to get your thoughts here. Social Security, Medicare, defense spending, and new taxes were all off the table at the beginning of these negotiations.

Which are the biggest pieces of any deficit spending and debt reduction you could undertake. Why? I mean, those are really kind of third rail issues. We're talking politics here now. I think it's interesting that those were all off the table, but something like work requirements for food stamps, which...

are already in place they just made like a little bit of tweaks to them i'm not sure i haven't seen any hard numbers of how much money that's supposed to save if any um right because it raised the age from like 50 to 54 for these requirements that that already existed so that's something like that gets in but something that might actually have a meaningful impact on the debt

is kind of off the table. You know, the Senate Budget Committee had a hearing a few, the beginning of the month, had a bunch of economists coming in and they were all saying the same thing, which is like, yeah, you guys need to figure out the debt ceiling and raise it. Obviously that's the, that has to happen.

But after all that, like really this has got to be an ongoing conversation between, you know, the balance of reducing spending and also raising taxes. Like that's really kind of the way that you reduce the debt. It's basic economics, but politics gets in the way of that all of the time. And so it's not so simple to do either of those things. It's going to be an ongoing battle, I think.

Yeah, I would also – these programs are really popular. When you talk to Americans – there was a poll in March from the Associated Press, and a lot of people agree that the government spends too much. But when you look at specific programs, the only one where just a real solid majority of Americans say the government spends too much is aid to other countries.

So there just aren't a lot of programs specifically that people would cut in domestic spending. And so I think that's part of it. But also I should add that, um, Moody's analytics did an analysis of the Republican bill as it originally passed. And that would have had an impact on the economy to cutting spending to the severe degree that they originally wanted could have slowed, um, GDP growth in the months to come and possibly caused a minor recession as well. So, um,

That cutting spending also has a cost in addition to any potential effect it might have on the debt deficit. So I think that's part of the reason you really see a lot of Americans and a lot of policymakers want to have these conversations separately, that it's not related to – it shouldn't be related to the debt ceiling conversation.

Right. And that report also said that it would have had a pretty significant impact on unemployment as well, raising unemployment even higher than, you know, the Fed is kind of aiming to. So that's something that potentially is avoided if we get through with this tentative agreement. But, you know, nobody wants their taxes to go up and nobody wants their programs to be cut. But they also don't like that the country's in debt. So, you know, one of those things has to give. Yeah.

And the president added that revenue side to it sort of late in the negotiations where he said, you know, we have to start talking about raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans and corporations or closing tax loopholes. And immediately House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Republicans said, absolutely not.

That is a nonstarter. There is no way that's going to be part of this conversation. And the president kept hammering them on that publicly, saying, you know, they only want to talk about the spending side of this. But to have the bigger conversation, like Kayleigh just mentioned, you have to at least talk about the revenue side. Republicans pooh-poohed that and said, you know, no, you don't.

don't necessarily have to, but we're also not going to do it at this point. And I wonder if looking back on it, of course they were not going to consider that right now as part of this conversation. And I wonder how much of that might have just been a negotiating tactic by the president of like, I'm going to throw this out there toward the end of this.

Knowing it's not going to go anywhere and then be able to say, well, look, I wanted this. I didn't get this. Because a big message from the White House last week as the negotiations continued was everybody is not going to get everything they want. This is how negotiations work. Karine Jean-Pierre, the press secretary, had like the understatement of the century when she said negotiations are hard.

And then kind of paused and everybody at the briefing was like, no kidding. But, you know, some of those things that were clearly not going to be part of the final agreement, they got to an agreement, but maybe were an effort by the White House to say, here's what we want. But we conceded on that point. Look, we tried to make a compromise.

Right. And I mean, part of the investment in the IRS, the goal of the investment in the IRS was to bring in more revenue without having to raise taxes. So being more efficient about going after people who are evading taxes makes sure that people who owe their taxes are paying them. And even that ended up getting rolled back a little bit with this agreement. So...

you know, not only do Republicans not want to raise taxes at all, they seem to have a bit of a problem with even collecting taxes that are already owed. It's a complicated issue. I mean, like you said, it's an understatement of the century to say that negotiations are hard. What we're seeing here is like a true compromise, which I guess we're just so unused to seeing in D.C. these days that it's a bit shocking. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Public polling shows that

aversion to taxes or Americans feeling like taxes are too high has been rising significantly. And it's actually at a higher point than it's been in recent years. Maybe that's a reaction to inflation and just the general sense that the household math is getting more tricky. But it seems like Americans are also a little wary of the IRS even. Like that seems like one of Republicans' more popular talking points is

And that also was sort of a weird workaround. They funded the IRS additional funding of $80 billion. They're going to take like maybe $20 billion of that and spend it on other discretionary spending that got defunded a little bit in this agreement. And so actually, the cuts aren't going to be as significant. But instead, they're going to cut the IRS budget.

But the IRS doesn't actually have to change its budget all that much for the next two years. It can use money from down the road to fund at the same levels that it wanted to already and then ask for more money later. Like, it is truly – I mean, the criticisms that I have heard are like, this is just truly nutso. Like, they both went in. It's all politics. It's all theater. And, like, not that much is changing.

So I'm curious now how lawmakers are reacting to all of this, given what we've said about the agreement.

Exactly as you would expect. You have conservatives who are calling this legislation insanity, who are saying, you know, they're absolutely not going to vote for this. There's a group of, our last count was around 10 House Republicans who said they were likely or an absolute no. As of our taping of this, that number will probably go up as we get closer to the time of the vote because they say it doesn't go far enough. It did not cut spending to the level that they wanted to see.

And then you have on the left progressives who are upset at the concessions the president made, those work requirements, even as modest as that is just by raising that age from 50 to 54, didn't like the message that it sends from the president. And that was something that they had said was a hard line for them. But here's the thing. You're right.

this was expected that you would likely lose people on both sides of the party. This is a piece of legislation that the president has said had to be bipartisan. It was something that he said Kevin McCarthy agreed would be done with both parties. And you're going to try and get this across the finish line with the votes in the middle. So losing, you know, 15 to 20 Republicans on the right and some progressives on the left doesn't tank the bill. But no surprise on something like this, you know,

You're hearing from all of the usual suspects who don't like it. But you had Kevin McCarthy say over the weekend exactly what the White House had been saying for a week. Everybody did not get everything they want. I think of this like to inject a little personal thing. I have three kids. And the phrase we always say is like, you get what you get and you don't get upset. And Kevin McCarthy can't use that because it's not going to work. Everybody is going to get upset. But they're, you know, working the phones and trying to do that hard lobbying effort to

to get as many as possible to get it across the finish line. The president's been doing it. He's been on the phone every day since the deal was announced Saturday night. And it's going to be interesting to see if it's moderate Democrats in the middle that really make up that bulk of the wave to carry it over. Yeah. Well, to extend the metaphor a little bit, I mean, fortunately for you, your kids don't have the opportunity to force a vote on your leadership with a single vote. Yeah.

I do not want to give the option at the dinner table. No, but like Kevin McCarthy does. He's basically one of his concessions in order to become House Speaker was to allow any member of the House to force a vote on his leadership altogether. And so he really can't piss off too many people without losing his job. Are there any rumblings about that being on the table or McCarthy being in jeopardy over this?

Kevin McCarthy said on Monday that he is confident that the negotiations won't cost him the speakership, that he's not worried at all about this. He thinks this is a good, strong bill that a majority of Republicans will support. Now, there are already starting to be rumblings from some conservatives that they will see what they can do about that. But

for now, he is publicly saying he feels okay about this. I don't want to, like, get everybody too freaked out in late May about what could be coming, but this is really the first big test for Kevin McCarthy. You know, this is the first major thing he has done and that we're already talking about potential threats to his speakership. They've got to

They've got to do this all over again in a couple of months just for the government funding bill that has to get passed to keep operations going. Imagine the fight that that's going to be and him trying to corral and wrangle all of the House Republicans on that. How he plays this over the next couple of days is going to be very critical to how he manages the threats from the right and quashes any of those threats to the speakership going forward then for the next couple of months.

Okay, let's get a little more wonky now. So we try to use polls to understand what Americans think

think. And we've tried to do that to get a sense of how Americans are processing these disagreements and compromises and so on. But it's really hard to actually figure out what Americans want if you do look at the polls. So Kayleigh, as you note in a piece on the website today, that last Tuesday, two polls came out on the very same day. And this is just emblematic of a broader issue here. There's a lot of contradictory polling. And it showed majorities of Americans wanting the

exact opposite things. So in one from CNN, 60% of Americans said Congress shouldn't raise the debt ceiling unless it cuts spending at the same time. In the other from Marist, 52% of Americans said Congress should raise the debt ceiling first and worry about spending cuts later. And you see like with both of these polls, headlines being like, the Democrats are doing the thing that Americans want. And then like Republicans are doing the thing that Americans want. WTF? Kayleigh, what's going on? Ha ha ha.

What is so confusing? They think that there should be spending cuts with the debt ceiling and also there shouldn't be. It's not that hard to understand. I mean, there was tons of polling like this. Basically, for any poll you could find showing one thing, you found something showing contradictory things.

There was a data for progress poll that showed a majority of likely voters said Congress should act as soon as possible to raise the debt ceiling and not, quote, waste time negotiating on spending. But then there was a tip issues and insights poll like from the same week, same days, where a plurality of Americans of 46 percent said that Congress should raise the debt ceiling only in exchange for spending cuts.

And we saw this again and again throughout different polls, even when asking, you know, somewhat simple questions like, okay, are you in favor of raising the debt limit? Something that at least most people would agree on that, right? No, that was completely split. You know, there was a YouGov poll that showed 40% Americans said they were in favor of it. 35% were opposed. 25% were unsure.

Another poll from Ipsos Reuters, 43% of Americans supported raising the ceiling while 54% opposed it. The polls were just all over the place. And there's a couple things going on here. Part of it is question wording. Some of these questions sort of primed respondents to perhaps think about the problem in a certain way or...

or they maybe just gave more information to sort of remind them of what exactly it is we're talking about while other ones would just ask them straight up, do you support raising the debt ceiling? If you're not sure what that means, you might just respond, you know, sort of with a gut instinct. And so that's part of what the problem is here. Another issue is just, you know, this is a complicated economic issue and not everybody really deeply understands it. There's good polling showing that

that's the case, that people aren't watching it that closely, that they feel that they don't understand it that deeply. And so that's going to also impact how they respond to these polls. Okay, so to ask our classic question, and I'm curious, Monica and Karen, if you have thoughts on this, is this a good or bad use of polling strategy?

Or maybe more to the point in this circumstance, which is the best use of polling? Like what is there one signal in all of this noise that we can sort of hold on to as being most representative of public opinion?

It seems that most Americans don't want the United States to default on its debts. I think right across polls, that seems to be a pretty steady finding. I'm not sure. So I don't know what that means, but...

But I would also say, you know, I think that I'm not sure. I think this is maybe a bad use of polling because I'm not sure. The debt ceiling is kind of a confusing thing. I think the United States is only one of two countries that really has one. When you talk to a lot of economists, I think they would rather see it go away because it has to do with making payments that have already been obligated. And so just it doesn't really have a lot to do with future spending in the way that I think Americans are receiving those questions today.

And so I'm not sure it's useful to know how they feel about these fights, particularly without explanation. Yeah, it does feel very process-y. You know, you're asking about a congressional process of do you want to couple these things together or should they be separate or should one come first? And, you know, I think when you get down to asking people about how congressional process should work, that's complicated. But maybe just the substance questions of, you know,

Is this a good thing? Is that a bad thing? Defaults. Like, Kayleigh, you kind of had a reaction to that about whether or not Americans think the government should default. Is the polling mixed on that, too?

Well, again, it sort of depends on the question you're asking. When you explain if they don't raise the debt ceiling, then they will default on their loans. You're right, Monica. Most people agree that the debt ceiling should be raised. When you don't explain all that and just say, what do you think? Should the debt ceiling be raised? Or do you think it should only be raised with spending cuts? Then it's a lot more mixed and we're seeing these contradictory results. So I think there's that knowledge gap there, right? I think

These individual polls, especially with those sort of headlines, as you mentioned, Galen, or people rattling off tweets based on a single poll, never a good idea in general. But especially in this case, it's just not representative. And I think when you do look at them in aggregate, it is telling a really interesting story of the fact that there isn't really a consensus here. There isn't like one popular...

position on one side or the other that would give extra power to the negotiations or decisions moving forward. So that kind of explains a little bit how we ended up with this compromise. It's not like either side was abandoning something that a majority of the country really wants and supports. There was a lot of confusion and mixed messages there. I think the polling around how much people are following it and how much they understand it is the best use of polling in this case. There was...

There was one question on a YouGov poll about

just asking people the correct definition of the debt ceiling. Do you know what the debt ceiling is? Is it a limit on government spending or is it a limit on the government's borrowing to finance spending that has already been approved? And half of Americans, 52%, chose the latter definition, which is correct, while a quarter chose the incorrect one and about 18% said they weren't sure. So a lot of people just don't even know what it is we're talking about. And that makes it a lot harder to gauge public opinion.

And we had a poll, ABC had a poll in early May with the Washington Post that found that Americans kind of spread the blame, too. You know, we love talking about the blame game in Washington, obviously. But, you know, that 39 percent said they blame Republicans in Congress and 36 percent said they blame Biden if there was a default. And that was interesting that it was pretty even there.

Because I think when you look back at 2011, when there was a debt ceiling showdown during the Obama administration, there was a much more of a focus on Congress back then than on the White House and then on the president. So it could just be that this is a president who has very low approval ratings.

in general at the moment. So he might just get more blame for things because of the state of affairs and how Americans view him. But also, you know, questions we kept asking the White House were, is that because of the strategy the president took here of staying very on the sidelines for all of those months, not engaging with Kevin McCarthy? And you had McCarthy out there talking and talking and talking. Even last week during the negotiations, there were three days where the president did not

addressed this issue publicly. He talked on Monday and then not again for three days. And Kevin McCarthy was talking multiple times a day. I mean, we joked, like, one of our colleagues was getting him on camera before 8.45 every day, before our morning meeting, he was that chatty. And you wonder how much of that influences, like, when people keep hearing the same message from him. You know, there was some begrudging credit from some White House officials of, like, McCarthy had a message and he stuck to it.

And they didn't agree with it, of course, but he was out there hammering them consistently for weeks and weeks and weeks. And the president stuck to his strategy of non-engagement and then not weighing in at every twist and turn.

Right. And that's a little bit what we see, too. A lot, you know, when you look at the partisan breakdowns, a lot of these polls are very aligned with the message of their respective parties. And when you don't, first of all, when you have this much fluctuation, it suggests that Americans don't have sort of strongly held fixed beliefs about this.

And also suggests, as I already mentioned, that there's not a deep understanding. And so in those cases, often people will turn to party leaders to kind of seek guidance. All right, well, what is our side's position on this and taking their cues from that? Yeah, I will say that you try to dig through – we got at this a little bit already – what exactly –

We can see sort of clearly in this mess of polling. It's that, yes, Americans don't want the U.S. to default. So like if you ask the question as a binary, we should only raise the debt ceiling if we cut spending and, you know, risk default as a result, or we should absolutely raise the debt ceiling regardless. You're going to direct respondents towards that second answer.

We should raise the debt ceiling. People do not want to default on government debt. But if you give people the option of we should raise the debt ceiling with no spending cuts, we should raise the debt ceiling and cut spending, we shouldn't raise the debt ceiling, they pick the middle one, which is that, so first and foremost, I think you can say Americans don't want to default. But I think second, you can say that Americans do actually want to cut spending. It's not more important than not defaulting, but it's still something that Americans want.

So I think that's maybe what starts to emerge in this morass of question wording and polling. And it looks like to some degree they're getting what they want. Finally, this is not a done deal yet. And Monica, you have written about what is all at stake here. If in today's Tuesday, six days, the House does not pass, the Senate does not pass, and Biden does not sign this agreement. So what could happen?

Well, I mean, in addition to federal employees possibly not getting their paychecks, there are just a number of millions of Americans who rely on money directly from the federal government. That includes about 66 million who get money through the Social Security program, which includes

$7.6 million receiving Social Security disability insurance. When you talk to advocates for the disability community, they will tell you that the payments they receive every month are already not enough. They're not allowed by policy to have a whole lot of savings. And so this is really a scary moment for them. You have veterans who rely on disability payments and health care. You have other kinds of issues that the federal government funds directly that would take an immediate hit.

But then you have knock-on effects. A default could raise interest rates, and so that could cause turmoil in an already weird housing market where there aren't enough buyers and not enough sellers. The housing market has been already a place where people affording houses, first-time homebuyers, are older and wealthier than they have been in previous generations. And so you could see in the long term just an increase in the wealth gap because homebuying is the way that we tend to build wealth in this country, especially for middle-income people.

And then just down the road, you're going to see potentially a recession. And how bad it gets depends on how long it lasts. Just because you have all these people with less money, you have higher interest rates, and that's going to have just a number of effects across the economy. Moody's calculated that a short debt ceiling breach would cause a 0.7% decline in real GDP and could raise unemployment to 5%. But a debt ceiling breach that lasts through July could cause what they called economic carnage.

The real GDP could fall by 4.6% in the last half of this year, and unemployment could rise to 8%. And this is already on top of an economy that's just a bit weird and has been in some turmoil since the COVID-19 pandemic. So

it could just have really big effects on the economy. And it would also be unprecedented. We haven't seen anything like this before, what government could do, what they should do, what exactly would happen. A lot of that is uncharted territory. Yeah.

Right. It sounds like there would also be a bunch of court cases over, like, can the government prioritize, you know, servicing the debt over, you know, funding some of the programs and things like that. So, yes. Yeah. Uncharted territory. We'll see. It seems like we're not going to get there, but you never know. You never know. We will be back next Monday.

Either talking about Biden signing a bill or we'll talk maybe a little more seriously about those numbers that you mentioned, Monica. But we are going to leave things there for today. Karen, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. We're going to move on and talk about why state legislative restrictions surrounding gender and sexuality have been increasing in recent years.

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Most state legislatures have either concluded their business for the year or will be wrapping up soon. And we at FiveThirtyEight have been tracking what kinds of laws are being proposed and passed on the state level since the year began.

One of those trends, which has also become increasingly visible on the national level, is restrictions surrounding gender and sexuality in Republican-led states. Those include, as I mentioned before, transgender participation in school sports, bans on transgender medical care for minors, limiting classroom discussions, and the list goes on.

Kaylee, you crunched the numbers on these laws. What kinds of trends have we seen in terms of the types of proposals and also the prevalence in recent years? Right. So our colleague Mary Radliff and I got data from the ACLU and the Trevor Project to look at bills that have been introduced and laws that have been passed over the past five years at the state level.

One major takeaway, which is perhaps not that surprising, but when you see the data over time, it becomes really apparent, is the number of bills being proposed and the number of laws being passed has really accelerated quite dramatically. So in 2018, two laws that were classified as anti-LGBT were

were passed into law. 38 bills had been introduced that legislative session. So far this year, 51 laws have been passed and more than 400 pieces of legislation were introduced. So it's really steeply climbed. What we see is, as far as specific types of legislation, it's changed over time, obviously. And they sort of follow these two- to three-year trends where a certain type of bill, so let's say a religious exemption where...

a law is passed that allows an individual or a business to deny service or to discriminate in some way against someone if their sexuality or gender presentation somehow goes against their personal religious beliefs. So, you know, think of the baker that doesn't want to make a cake for a gay wedding. Laws that would protect those individuals. Those were really popular early on, and what you'd see is sort of

a few states introducing these bills and then not maybe they go to committee and don't get much further and then the next year you see a lot more they've had time to sort of iterate to find out what's sticking in committee find out what is popular among voters and get a little more momentum and then by you know the third year a bunch of those laws a bunch of those bills are being

passed into law and they start moving on to the next trend. So we've seen kind of different styles of bills ebb and flow over time. You know, there was the bathroom bills. They had a moment. The last couple years, sports bans for transgender athletes kind of had a moment. So in 2018, there wasn't a single piece of legislation introduced anywhere that would affect trans athletes from participating in sports.

In 2019, there were two. By 2020, there were 23. And then you start to see 2021, 2022, 74, 70, and those are starting to pass as well. We saw nine bills passed into law.

In 2021, 10 passed in 2022, and now it's starting to slow down a little bit because a lot of them became law and they feel like they've achieved their goal and they're moving on to some of the new issues of the day. So in this case, those school restrictions you mentioned, as well as health care restrictions on gender-affirming care for trans kids, that's sort of been the du jour topic for this kind of legislation in the last year.

Yeah. I mean, actually, Monica, you're joining us from a state where some of these debates have played out, which is Arkansas. I'm curious how these debates have played out in the states. Is this fully Republican led? Are there any Democrats who are, you know, state level Democrats who are on board with this stuff? How has the public responded? You know, what, how have these laws played out as they have been enacted in Republican led states?

You know, it is really Republican-led, and I would also say that it's happening in a lot of states where Republicans have really strong majorities and evangelical Christian populations are really high. And so you see some overlap with some other issues that evangelical Christians care about, like abortion.

I know that Amelia Thompson DeVoe and Meredith Conroy have written about the ways that abortion is viewed by people who have a sense of traditional gender norms. And so I think that you see a lot of the debates unfolding sort of in that way. Our governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, had an ad where she talked about quote-unquote real women, and it was targeting some of these issues. There's a long history of Republican women talking about how they're the real feminists because they care about real women. And so there's this kind of

language around what gender means and what sexuality means that is based on these very traditional gender roles and very traditional views on the roles that men and women should take in society and what that means. So I see that playing out. And I do see laws like banning trans athletes in youth sports being pretty popular among a lot of people. And there just aren't a lot of Democrats to protest, although they have.

Yeah, I mean, I've been looking at some of the polling on this, and it's fluctuated a little bit as people have come, you know, as you mentioned, Kayleigh, these laws are relatively new, so people are still getting a sense of what they mean or what they do.

And it seems like over time, actually, Americans have sided more with Republicans on this in terms of questions surrounding is gender defined at birth? According to Pew, most recently, 60% of Americans say that it is. The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation also did a bunch of polling on this focus specifically on trans issues and found that majorities of Americans agree

support bans on transgender athletes playing on the teams of the genders they identify as. You know, other things, sort of medical care for minors involving hormone therapy. You know, it seems like the majority of Americans are on the side of Republicans on this,

How has that unfolded? Like, has there been protests or backlash from either the White House or Democrats? Or is this just a place where, you know, Democrats don't really want to talk about it because, you know, public opinion is on the side of Republicans? I think that's an oversimplification as far as the public opinion. You know, a lot of these issues evolve over time. If you think of gay marriage, you know, there was pretty significant opposition to that not that long ago. And then, you know, once the Supreme Court made its decision, the

majority of Americans support gay marriage now, and that keeps going up every year. Like more and more Americans are okay with it. You know, Caitlin Smith, who is at the Trevor Project and shared the data with us, mentioned a similar thing happening with bathroom bills where, you know, there was pretty strong support for these kinds of bills, but

when these issues are debated because of new legislation, it sort of forces the topic into the public sphere suddenly and people learn more. They understand, you know, they start to hear from trans individuals and gender non-conforming people and learning more about them and what that means and what that looks like. And opinions start to change a little bit once people have a greater understanding of

Um, it's sort of right now, you know, these are, some of these are new issues in a way that people hadn't thought about before. And so sometimes there's sort of a gut reaction response to it that could change over time. Nationally, uh, it's a little more mixed and, and for certain issues, actually, uh, the majority of Americans are not on the side of Republicans. So you mentioned the sports bands. That's a, that is one that tends to be pretty popular even at the national level, but other ones like, um,

legislation banning transgender kids from getting gender-affirming care that's not really popular when you look at the national level.

As Monica mentioned, though, at the state level, the situation is very different. And in these states, especially where they're passing a lot of these laws, there is pretty firm support from voters. They want this kind of legislation. They agree with it. And their Republican leaders are delivering in their state legislatures. That's partly why we're seeing the number of bills and laws continue to go up. So they're getting good feedback from their constituents, like these bills are passing and

their constituents support it. They're still winning their elections. And so they're, that's feedback for Republican state lawmakers to continue down this path and to continue tackling these issues. I would say there's also, I think some spillover into issues that we already thought of as being settled or getting more popular. Like same-sex marriage nationally is very popular, but among evangelical Christians, it's, uh,

they don't support it in the same numbers. And actually, the number of evangelical Christians that support same-sex marriage dipped last year. And the people at Public Research, or PRRI, had sort of hypothesized that that was because some of these other issues are coming into the public space. And so it's making people think about it more. And they also support being able to deny services to LGBTQ couples.

LGBTQ couples for things like that. So it's not all at the state level and when you get down to different populations, there's less support and possibly even declining support for a lot of things we already thought were settled.

Yeah, I mean, like, I think this is in some ways unsettled in American public opinion. But when you look at Pew, which has done polling across at least five years at this point on this issue, in 2017, 54% of Americans said that sex is assigned at birth. And now it's 60%. And they've, you know, they pulled this once in between as well. It goes from 54% to 56% to 60%.

And you see, it seems like public opinion moving more in the direction of Republicans' position on this. And in the Washington Post, you know, partnered with the Kaiser Family Foundation, as I mentioned, things like therapy for transgender youth, overwhelming majority support for that. But things like hormonal therapy, minority support for that.

And the only other thing you see majority support for is a sort of blanket, like non-discrimination against transgender Americans. You know, 60 plus percent of Americans say transgender people should be protected from discrimination. But then on a lot of these individual issues, majorities are on the side of Republicans here. I mean, I do wonder if Republicans are sort of

growing support amongst the public for these kinds of things? Like, have you found that that isn't the case? I mean, this is striking me as a bit similar to the debt ceiling question in that it depends on

the population being polled. It depends on the way the question is asked and how much information is given. And these are complex topics that a lot of people don't know as much about. They might not have any trans friends or family that they can immediately identify with. And there's some questions. If you word it in a certain way that makes hormone therapy sound really scary and invasive, you might automatically oppose it. If you

worded in a way that, you know, do you think doctors and parents should get to decide what kind of medical treatment their children receive? You might be more in favor of it. So I don't know that there's consensus here. That doesn't mean that, oh, everybody's in favor of it secretly and we're just not asking the right questions. I think that it's an unsubtle question as far as public opinion. People don't have solid fixed views. They're

changing depending on their political beliefs and their religious beliefs and what they're learning about these topics as we, you know, sort of discuss them more deeply as a society. So I think it's an influx. I definitely wouldn't say that more and more Americans are siding with Republicans on these issues and, you know, getting more conservative in their views about LGBTQ people. I don't think that's accurate. Yeah.

It is interesting, notably Trump entered the White House as the first president to enter the White House supporting same-sex marriage. And it felt like some of these issues took a backseat. Now, Trump banned transgender participation in the military, notably, but didn't talk that much about it.

about gender and sexuality, certainly not as much as we have seen Republicans talk about it since Biden has taken office. And as your data suggests, what happened here? Like, how did this become so much more prominent as an issue after, you know, Trump famously focused on the new culture war issues, which you could call

immigration, trade, the sort of populist message. Yeah, I mean, Trump very quickly pivoted away from any kind of progressive embrace of the LGBTQ community. But as you mentioned, he wasn't sort of aggressively- And he had gays for Trump in 2020 with Tiffany Trump and Marla Maples. Gays for Trump, yeah. Yeah.

Obviously, the religious right has long played a very crucial part in the Republican Party's base. We're seeing religious rights groups literally writing legislation that lawmakers are then bringing forward and in some cases passing. That's part of the reason why you see this coordination between states where these trends emerge. You know, they're looking at other states, but they're also talking to religious groups that are pushing certain issues forward and saying, OK, now we want to talk about

in sports. You know, now we want to talk about what kind of materials kids are being taught at what age. That's having an influence. And as I said, there's this feedback loop where it's, you know, getting support from their voters, they're passing through committee, like things are building off of it. They're seeing it as a fruitful opportunity

a fruitful sort of part of the culture wars, if you will, that seems to be working for them. And so it just keeps moving forward. So we're definitely going to see more of this with 2024. Obviously, DeSantis has made focus on this kind of legislation a big part of his agenda as governor. And education in particular, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. The Don't Say Gay bill, you know,

They were kind of at the forefront in many ways on some of this legislation, one of the first states to pass certain kinds of legislation like this.

And he's not been shy about taking credit for that and championing that and making big shows of signing the bills. So that's obviously going to be part of his message going forward. I think any of the governors, fellow governors who are jumping into the race that are coming from these states that have passed it might consider if that's what they want to build some of their platform on as well. Now they've got this track record of hundreds of laws being passed that

And, you know, they can point to that and it sort of shows where they stand on these issues. All right. Well, we're going to leave things there for today on that issue. But Monica, stick around and chat about your book with me. Kaylee, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks, guys.

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As I mentioned at the top, today is a big day for Monica. Her much-anticipated book, The Forgotten Girls, is officially being released. The book is rooted in your hometown, Monica, in rural Arkansas, and addresses a notable trend in American life, that life expectancy for white people who did not graduate from high school, and particularly women, has been declining in a way we haven't seen before.

And Monica, you tell that story through the research, but also through your own experience as someone who went to college and left their hometown and the experience of your best friend from high school, Darcy, who did not. So first and foremost, can you just put this trend in perspective for us a little bit? What exactly is going on here?

Yeah. So life expectancy in the United States is dropping. And it's driven a lot by a drop in the least educated white Americans and young Americans. Americans aged like 24 to 64, you know, young and middle-aged Americans. And

It's happening particularly – one of the biggest drops is the least educated white Americans. And so that has been attributed to deaths of despair, which was the word, the phrase that Angus Deaton and Anne Case gave to it to Princeton economists who wrote about the issue first in 2015. They came out with a book a few years ago.

But there are a lot of other health issues that are rising for that group and a lot of other things causing early deaths for those group of people. So the least educated white women in the country have seen a pretty big drop, especially in rural areas like my hometown, Clinton, Arkansas, which is on the southern edge of the Ozarks.

So I came back here a few years ago to explore that story and to write about it. And in the course of that, I reconnected with my childhood best friend who had not graduated from high school, even after I left and went to college. One thing that I really liked about your book is that you don't take deaths of despair as an answer. You take it as more of a jumping off point, you know, like,

What is a death of despair? You know, why are some communities turning to drugs? Where is the despair coming from? What did you find when you sort of dug deeper than that answer?

Yeah, I mean, I wanted to come back to Clinton, too, to think about the ways that where we live and who's around us shape our choices and shape our responses to things and shape the lives that we can expect to lead. And so it's not a simple answer. I spent five years trying to think about it.

But, you know, the ways that life can unfold for women in particular in an area like a small town are kind of limited. And, you know, you're expected to start a family, you're expected to get married young. You're, especially in a highly evangelical community like mine, the expectations for us are sort of circumscribed in a lot of ways. And I think that

when I came back and started to look at some of the paths that people took here, there weren't, there wasn't as much freedom as I experienced after having going away and sort of making my own way in the world. There's also a lot of economic despair in this area. There aren't a lot of jobs. A lot of manufacturing have left over the years. It's an isolated community. It's not super connected to the world. And there aren't a lot of sense, there aren't a lot of

places to be a Clintonite. There aren't a lot of places to go. There's the school and there's church and there isn't a lot of sense of community outside of those places. And so I think all of those things kind of slowly have an effect on the way people live their lives. And how do your experience and Darcy's experience illustrate that? Because like I mentioned, you know, you take the research, but you also root it in some ways in the story of you and your high school best friend.

Yeah. So my high school best friend was Darcy. She was my best friend starting in first grade. We were really close. We were almost like sisters. We were both gifted in school. We both had a lot of ambition to get out. We used to look at an atlas and imagine the big towns that we would live in that weren't like our town at all. We wanted to live in an area that looked like a neighborhood that looked like what we saw on TV with sidewalks and other kids to play with.

We wanted to go to California. Those kinds of really big dreams over the years changed for both of us. For me, they sort of became a reality. I did go away, far away to college. Darcy sort of got sidetracked by partying and boys, and she ended up staying in Clinton. And I think she connected with some not great influences in her life. She had some bad relationships there.

She became a mother young. She was in and out of the workforce. She didn't go to college. And she really didn't fulfill what I felt at the time was her full potential. That led to or that would enhance an already troubling substance use disorder that she was developing. She continued to have that substance use disorder and got in trouble with the law at different times and got kind of really trapped in the legal system over the course of most of her 20s and 30s.

So I'm very happy to say she's doing much better. She's been sober since 2019. But I came back and sort of wanted to chart her journey after high school and see what it was like. And I felt that for me, being away, being in a different place where I could do different things and live a different kind of life was really critical for me to kind of experience the world in a different way. And that was sort of the contrast that I drew from.

Was there a clear sort of fork in the road where your lives diverged? Or say for the two of you, or even just through the research, is it possible to pinpoint where opportunity, prosperity, life expectancy diverges for people?

I think there are a bunch of little tiny things that add up by the time you're 18 years old. There's a lot of research showing that girls, by the time they reach middle school, are more concerned with other non-academic things in school. They're concerned with their social life. They're concerned with looking pretty. They're sort of trained to think about how they are perceived by the world in a way that's different from the way I think boys are encouraged to take risks

and be ambitious. I think that was very true in the 1980s and 90s when Darcy and I was growing up. And I think it's still pretty true today. You see girls think that they're bad at math. Girls think that they aren't as good at school as they are. So I think that kind of self-esteem starts to wear down for girls early on. In a lot of very traditional communities, girls are taught to aim for marriage and admire the institution of marriage in a way that they don't do other things.

in really traditional communities like evangelical Christian communities. They're taught to be help meets for their future husbands. That kind of changes the way you view your own ambition. When I was growing up, a science teacher told us that the best job for girls was to be a teacher because you could be off with your kids and you could have summers off with your kids. And so the

that women would take the primary caregiving role and their families was already there. We also have a, I talked to graduates from 2019 and they still had a really very bifurcated sense of possibility for themselves. They thought that boys could go into trade schools and be plumbers and builders and make good livings without going to four-year schools. And they thought that those paths weren't available to them, to girls. So I think that you still see those kinds of,

ideas shape early ambition and then that changes the way what that changes what you want and what you think you can achieve and I think for some girls that's really devastating and kind of slowly wears them down in doing all of this was it clear how to improve things

It wasn't really clear how to improve things, but I will say that I think a lot about what I would like my hometown to look like in the future. And that just really goes down to building communities. I'd love to see places for teenagers and adults to gather outside of churches and schools and to like foster different kinds of creativity. I'd like to see art schools and music schools and...

You know, just I'd like to see the downtown rehabilitated. It's a little bit run down. I think that those kinds of things seem really basic, but they matter a lot when you think about how you spend your day and conceive of your place on this earth. Yeah. No, I had a couple conversations on this podcast about American loneliness and loneliness.

The ideas for ways of building community sound so rudimentary from the urban planning to the institutions that exist in your area, whether it is religious based or creativity based or food based or whatever it may be, like having repeated interactions with

with the people in your community is the jumping off point for creating friendships and networks and things like that that help root people and ultimately contribute to their happiness and contentedness. And so, yeah, I think that's so significant. You know, what was it like for you going back to Clinton for five years to write this story?

I mean, it was really difficult because the book is, I call it a reported memoir. So I had to report, I had to interview people I knew and I'd known my whole life and reconstruct my own childhood and read my childhood journals, which I don't recommend to anyone because it's often pretty embarrassing. I had to sort of also write about, I had to report, which I'm used to because I'm a reporter, and I also had to write about my subjective emotional experience.

which was harder. And I think about that a lot because I feel like the book needed to be rooted in this really personal experience because I felt I have deep roots in this community. You know, I have family buried here. I grew up here. My parents grew up here for the most part. It felt to me like the kind of story that an insider needed to tell because I can go back and talk about our childhoods and talk about all the promise that sort of slowly was

you know, disappeared for some of us in a way that I think you can't if you just jump in today and see the condition of people today. So it was really important for me to root it in that history and that personal story. And that was really, really, really challenging and I hope rewarding. Yeah, it's an extremely well-written book, so I recommend it.

For anyone. Monica, thank you for sharing that with us today. And the name of the book is Forgotten Girls for anyone who's interested. Thank you, Monica. Thank you so much.

My name is Galen Druk. Tony Chow is in the control room and also on video editing. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or a review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.