And you know what? I'm gonna make
some people uncomfortable by doing that.
But I'm not gonna give up on the American people.
And this isn't the end.
This doesn't solve all the problems.
This is the first step.
I'm gonna announce a commission coming forward from the speaker, from bipartisan,
both sides of the aisle.
The majority driver of the budget is mandatory spending.
It's Medicare on the debt.
>> And you will let us seee.
>> So you only have 11% to look at this budget.
>> That was just a few weeks ago with Kevin McCarthy saying that he's going
to get this commission together to look into what to do about Social Security,
Medicare and Medicare Medicaid.
If you're like me, you're on the edge of your seat.
I don't know what he's gonna propose.
An expansion of benefits?
A cut of benefits.
It could be either, who's to say?
We're still a little bit out from that.
But we already have a pretty good idea of where the vast majority of the Republicans
in the House are gonna go because we have this new budget plan that was put out
by a subset of the Republicans, 175 of them, by the way.
And in their proposal,
they would gradually raise Social Security's full retirement age.
The age at which people are eligible for the full benefits of Social Security
that you will have paid into for decades and decades by then, to 69,
up from the current level of 67 for those born in 1960 or later.
Which, by the way,
they often say that they're only targeting people that are super young.
Haven't really gotten much skin in the game yet.
But I feel like that's a pretty broad timeline, actually.
And that is a pretty big difference if it's 67 now and for
those of you out there, it's 69.
That is two full additional years of labor,
two full fewer years of actually drawing those benefits.
Benefits which after this plan, if it gets passed, will likely be smaller anyway.
That's thousands and thousands of dollars and
a lot more hours of labor before you can finally get some time off.
We have a lot more that actually makes it even worse than that.
But I want to give both of you a chance to jump in, starting with you, Mondale.
What do you think about what looks like it could be the plan for the Republicans?
>> Well, it seems like their plan is successful in making sure that black
people don't ever get retirement,
since the average age of black people in America is about 60.8 years.
So it's like you could qualify for
Social Security right before you have eight months left to live.
I think it's absolutely disgusting that the idea of fixing the debt is taken away
from the poorest people while we still give tax cuts to people with planes and
helicopters and stuff like that.
>> We just came off a year where for the first time in decades and decades, and
decades.
US life expectancy fell like we're no
longer expected to live as long as we were ten years ago.
So it's not just, well,
we'll extend it two years because people are living longer.
No, we're not.
You're taking away two years of retirement for us so
that you can keep giving money to the people who do not need it.
That is what's happening here.
And they're doing it after months of swearing up and down,
screaming at President Biden during the State of the Union
that we're totally not cutting Social Security.
We're not cutting Medicare.
Yes, you are.
And you're doing it right after you threw tantrums for
the first half of the year saying that you weren't.
>> Exactly yeah, they were so indignant.
How dare you imply that no, you can't look at my notes.
You can't see them yet.
They'll be coming out in a few months or whatever.
But I do like that your mind went to the exact same place as mine in terms of life
expectancy.
But it's even a little bit worse, because in the notes for
this RSC budget proposal, it says specifically why they feel like they can
raise the age before you can start getting the full benefits.
And they say it would also make modest adjustments to the retirement age for
future retirees to account for increases in life expectancy, which,
as you've already implied, is the exact opposite of the truth.
Just to be clear, life expectancy at birth for
women in the US dropped 0.8 years back in 2021.
For men, it's a full year from 74.2 to 73.2.
So, mondale, if it makes you feel better, white men might soon catch up in terms of
not being able to draw eventually from Social Security.
But it's bad enough that now you'll get five years on average before you die,
but then they go and
lie to you that we're only doing this because you guys are living longer.
And look, one of the reasons there's a lot that they will do that I think is
incredibly cruel, incredibly heartless when it comes to these sorts of programs.
But I often think about how much money was saved by the fact that they
were able to convince tons of people to not take COVID seriously and
to get needlessly sickened many died.
Well over a million people died disproportionately older.
I'm not saying that that was a conscious thought process necessarily, but
they could be pretty cruel and heartless when it comes to saving money,
doing literally anything to stop taxes from needing to go up.
And that, of course, is a potential solution to this problem.
As of right now, if people watching this don't know just the first
$160,200 of wage earnings are subject to Social Security's payroll tax,
allowing the rich to stop contributing to the program early each year.
So your wages, likely the entirety of it, is taxed for Social Security.
For the wealthy, it can be just a small portion.
Now, you could raise that cap, and that would solve the problem,
but it would create a new problem,
which is slightly higher taxes on the wealthiest people in the country.
>> We should be extremely clear when we say things like,
Republicans are proposing something as the exact opposite of the truth.
No, Republicans are the exact opposite of the truth.
That's not a good thing as a progressive because it makes the so called liberal
wing of our party more closer to Republicans and want to negotiate more.
And it's pulling our party to the right, saying that what they believe,
the extreme ideas of them, like cutting Social Security,
like kicking people off Medicaid, like making sure poor people stay poor.
And giving tax cuts to rich people, is part of our conversation now,
as if this is normal.
We used to have this policy in this country, allegedly.
Think about when the first famine happened, 1932, when people were poor,
not because of anything they caused themselves, but because of a crash,
that we would take care of these people.
We would make sure that people had enough to survive.
I don't know what happened in this country.
I'm lying, I know exactly what happened in this country where we say a poor can be
demonized.
It's when black people became available for these services or when it was said,
okay, you can't send people to Europe and fighting World War II.
And then bring them back as veterans and
not give them the GI Bill to put them in the middle class.
So let's demonize poor people.
>> I also think that we have to understand with this legislation,
this has now been out for, what, 48 hours ish.
Where's the message from the left?
Where's the message from the Democrats?
Why has Biden not walked up to a podium and been like, boy,
remember what I told you earlier this year?
Look at this.
I know, sure, it's only been 48 hours, but it's also already been 48 hours.
And this administration, everybody on the left needs to be harping on this.
The draft of it came out last Friday, so we've known about it for seven days.
This should be the big story, especially due to the fact that they spent so
many months saying, president Biden's lying.
We'll never do this.
We're not going to touch your Social Security.
I mean, Trump's even been hitting Ron DeSantis for wanting to do it, for
God's sake.
Why are the Democrats not already producing the ads and
putting them out on TV talking about what they're doing right now?
They could do it.
They're just not.
>> Fair is being nice.
It took us, what, 60 or 50 years to get caught up on the pro life argument?
We got 50 years before we respond to this.
Let's get serious.
>> I agree with you that it seems like more than enough time for Biden and
others to respond to it's.
Also, by the way I checked.
And it is enough time for people like Kevin McCarthy who are not a part of
the RSC to come out and say, no, we don't agree with that.
That's crazy.
We're not gonna do that.
They're not saying anything.
He's not saying anything about the fact that 175 of the Republicans that he's
gonna have to try to whip on whatever bill he comes out with already like this plan.
They want it.
He's been mighty quiet.
But anyway, I don't want people to think that this is just about Social Security.
While the recent budget plan from Republicans does intend to dramatically
cut your Social Security benefits, rather than even starting a conversation
about possibly raising taxes on the wealthy Americans.
It's not a part of the conversation.
That is not where it stops.
Now, you might think coming out of all the debt ceiling conversation,
that Republicans are really focused on keeping the deficit low and
they're really worried about the national debt.
Well, if you want to maintain that thought,
you're gonna want to click away because their proposal also would call for
call for massive tax cuts by proposing a permanent extension of the individual
tax provisions of the 2017 Trump GOP tax law.
So Trump tax cuts, which extended for years, and the way that they were able to
pass it was by saying back then that it's not gonna be permanent,
we're just gonna do it for a few years.
Well, now they want to make it permanent.
CBO estimates that would cost $2.5 trillion over ten years.
We already lost over $2 trillion on it.
They want to double down on that while also talking constantly about how big of
an issue the deficit and the debt are.
But it's not just overall debt.
They also want to mess with Medicare.
They want to start a premium support model that would subsidize private
insurance plans so effectively, as with everything else,
taking public money and putting it into private insurance.
The plan also contains a provision that would force disability beneficiaries to
wait five years instead of the current two before becoming eligible for
Medicare benefits.
So they're effectively messing guys with all of these different programs.
They're not happy to just start with one Medicaid.
God only knows what's gonna be left of it after they're done with it.
But what do you all think?
>> I also want to point out,
because there is one very important part of that was not mentioned.
It also calls for dramatic federal cuts to the nationwide school lunch program.
So part of what they're also fighting for
is to take food out of the mouths of hungry children.
It's like if you put in one of those AI prompts come up with the most evil
Republican plan and this is what it is.
And they're like, yes, looks good to me.
Because this is everything Republicans have ever wanted.
Tax cuts, Social Security cuts, Medicare cuts,
taking food away from hungry poor people.
It's the most evil thing you could imagine.
And it's going to make it to the House floor.
And that's the worst part about all of this.
It could become their new reality.
And they're not even afraid to let people see this.
They have no shame.
They love it, they embrace it.
And it just blows my mind.
Every time I read this thing, it blows my mind.
>> I think you were absolutely accurate, except one thing you said the worst part
about it is it's gonna make it to the House floor.
No, the worst part about it is Democrats are going to start negotiating and pull.
People will lose some of these services,
some of these features will get we will lose people to this.
This is basically legislating death for poor people.
And that's not hyperbole.
I'm not trying to be an alarmist, but we should be really clear about that.
Some people only meal, some kids only meal happen at school.
So the idea that you're trying to cut lunch free and breakfast,
you're trying to starve kids and it is absolutely disgusting that we call
ourselves this prosperity nation, and I don't see it at all.
Especially when you see so many more than 60% of
Americans living paycheck to paycheck and some even less than that.
It is absolutely disgusting for sure.
>> Yeah, 100% by the way, in terms of the school meals.
I was watching a video of Elise Stefanik,
who was freaking out that the Biden administration had considered a regulation
that would replace chocolate like flavored milk with regular milk.
And they were implying that this is insane, woke communism going out of
control, but get rid of all of the milk for free, [LAUGH] that's suddenly fine.
So the kids better be able to drink chocolate milk as long as they can drink
any milk.
As soon as we have the chance, we're just gonna take away all of the milk from them.
And that's perfectly fine.
It's such twisted priorities.
But I do want to throw out one other thing, because Mondale,
you brought up that the negotiations are gonna begin.
This RSC thing is a Republican thing, but what Kevin McCarthy is gonna set up,
he says, is gonna be bipartisan.
He's gonna get some Democrats on his side.
Now, since Biden is the President and
theoretically can veto whatever they put out, it doesn't seem like
there's any electoral benefit to any Democrats to sign on to this.
But that doesn't mean that there's not some sort of benefit in terms of campaign
donations, jobs, once they leave office.
So do you expect that he's gonna get what he wants and in the House, possibly for
the Senate version, we are gonna have some Democrats crossing over.
Any particular names, cross your mind,
that you think could become a big part of this?
>> What's that a Republican Democrat guy from West Virginia.
Yeah.
>> Joe Manson.
>> Yeah, but he's not the only one that comes to mind.
Let's be honest.
The Democrats sold us out in the deficit.
What we just saw was a failure to be on the side of people.
We allow Republicans to hold us hostage every chance they get, and
Republicans don't even mind.
They told us Barack Obama was going to be a one turn and president.
And when they couldn't do that, they said, well,
we're not gonna give them the chance to appoint a Supreme Court justice.
What do we do when we have the power to do that or even expand the court?
We sit sidle.
We sit idle and tell the world that just gave us the Senate,
the House, and I'm talking about 2020 results and also the White House.
We tell them, well, we can't because Cinema and
Joe Mansion don't want to play with us.
Get out of here.
Where's the pressure from our side to keep people in line?
I appreciate the Republicans walking and talking all the craziness they want to and
then sticking to it.
I just wish we had the goal to do that on our side.
>> I think that's a really good point, especially when we're looking at it as
the fact that Republicans always start these so
called negotiations from the most extreme point possible.
It's like they come out and say, listen, we're going to burn down the House.
Y'all negotiate on what you want to get out of the House while it's on fire.
But instead of the Democrats saying, well, hold up, maybe we just don't set
the House on fire, Democrats immediately start, okay, so the House is burning.
We accept that.
We'll take the pets and maybe a couple of the kids.
We can't get them all.
And it's just coming from this position of weakness already.
Surrendering to the crazy without ever stopping to say, absolutely not,
we're not gonna burn the House down, so
we're not gonna negotiate on what we have to pull out of it.
[LAUGH] we always come from this position of weakness to start off, and
that's how Republicans continue to win no matter what the issue is.
And like you said, this isn't gonna become law, biden's gonna veto it, but
there's gonna be horrible things that do come from it because we're starting
from such an extreme position.
>> Think about this for a second, all right?
We have never got anything large.
No victories on our side came from bipartisanship.
Everything that we've got, we had to exclude them, right?
So why are we praising bipartisanship when they don't care about it at all?
Actually, bipartisanship in Republican will get you unelected.
Talking like that will get you unelected yet and still we keep talking about,
we want a bipartisan effort for
what we should be doing, what supports this big tent party?
We say that we are a part of and I don't see us fighting like that.
And I think that's gonna come back to bite us in this general election coming up.
>> Yap, and look, for now, they have this narrow majority in the House, but
theoretically, the Democrats can take it back next time.
And I personally think that isn't it nice that in your quest to regain control of
the House.
The opposition party is spending their limited time and
limited power trying to steal meals from poor kids,
force you to work a couple more years before you can retire.
And also take control over your bodily autonomy away from you?
But again, you have to actually talk about that.
And as Farron pointed out, I don't know, Biden, he gave one speech recently.
I guess that's something, I don't know.
I feel like you could get out there, buddy.