Words Matter: No, No, Norm, It’s Much Worse Than That

subbasement of the Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C. and from other undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello everybody and welcome to Words Matter, I'm David Rothkoff, one of your hosts and

I'm joined as always by the great Norm Ornstein who has the wisdom to be at the beach

enjoying August, not too far from where Joe Biden enjoys his summer beach experiences. Are you headed out to get some, I don't know, cotton candy or Turkish taffy or whatever it is people buy at the beach these days. A lot of people buy that stuff but I'm not generally into Turkish taffy or cotton candy. However, the twice cooked french fries out here are pretty good, pretty pretty good.

“I know you'd find your way to something on healthy, speak in and Krebs, you have Krebs?”

There are lots of Krebs here, oh yeah, no that's everybody, Merrill and Krebs. Yes.

I don't know about that, Krebs are painted in the astide, I'm always people are always

going, oh go to this place and eat Krebs, you know what I'm saying? You'll have a mess of Krebs, I don't know what that is, but it's a mess, and then there's all these Krebs and then they give you a hammer and they say isn't this fun, it's like I'm like working and working, there's like this little tiny bit of food, you get your aggressions out by hanging away, but the crab cake you don't have to work at, the most famous

Krebs place, I used to live in an apple, it's called camplers, camplers, and it's right down on the water, you could go in the boat and I just never, I'm from New Jersey, I'm like a hogey, anyway, you know earlier this week you had an article in the New Republic as you told us you would last week and it's called the Republicans are going to kill people but not until

“after they vote, I think this may be incorrect, I think they may be killing some now, but even”

as we speak, even as we speak, but I thought maybe this would be a good chance for you to talk a little bit about what you say in your article. Yes, thank you, okay, just as a praisey, I first started to write this because I had noticed as many others have but it was getting no attention that the so-called big beautiful bill which is the opposite, it's big, but it ain't beautiful, includes a trillion dollars in cuts in Medicaid over a ten-year period but they postpone them

until after the midterm elections and then they phase them in so that the big cuts come further down the road but their big cuts coming in January and I thought this is going to be horrible for an awful lot of people but then I began to realize that it's worse, it's even worse than that.

“Now, there are a couple of important points to make here, first is the biggest changes that they've”

made are building in terribly onerous work and reporting requirements and they keep saying all the time at the number of able-bodied people on Medicaid who are not working. When we've had studies that show that a very substantial share of them are not working in jobs because they're home-taking care of family members but regardless of that those work requirements, the paperwork requirements which most people no matter how well educated would have trouble filling out are going to

take 11-12-15 million people off the Medicaid rules and they're celebrating that but what never gets

mentioned is that money doesn't go to these people it goes to the providers and the reality is that hospitals, doctors, even insurance companies but especially nursing homes rely heavily on that revenue so what happens when we cut it the first thing that happens is more hospitals are going to go out of business and hospitals we know have been in trouble for a very long time or hospitals refused to accept it which has already happened with the Mount Sinai system in New York.

with a health emergency they have to be treated even if they don't have means to pay it.

“So pick one example from the past and we talk all the time about rural hospitals and deep trouble”

which they are but a few years ago a big hospital in Philadelphia which took care of most of the poor people in the area had to close and what happened to all the other hospitals they were overrun their emergency rooms couldn't handle it because all of the people who used to go to that hospital had to go to these hospitals and that meant that if you are I and we're in an age where

you know stuff happens big to speak for you know driving that car yours you might you know

have an ankle injury when you were shifting gears. Yeah just to injure myself getting in and out of the car there's that too the last few years I had a meata I had some of that difficult and you had to go

“to an emergency room do that in one of these places where one of the hospitals closed and you're”

to be waiting for hours longer but let's turn to nursing homes almost two thirds of all the people in nursing homes in America disabled people elderly people are on Medicaid people can't afford

this both to them we're talking a lot of money so what happens in most cases is that individuals

paid on their assets until they're pretty much impoverished then on Medicaid they can qualify to have their nursing home care paid for take that away where cut it substantially nursing homes are going to close people are going to be out on the street people are going to have to go to their relatives at the same time and here's where we get into some of the interactive effects they cut out insurance support for home health care so if you are home taking care of a relative and you've been

relying on the home health care subsidy or if you are working for a home health care agency you're going to be in bigger trouble and of course what's going to happen is that nursing homes that stay in business are going to cut way back on their services cut back on their help and then we get the triple whammy that was the double whammy the triple whammy here is a hundred thousand or more Haitians have been working in the health world there are orderly sim hospitals there

technicians or helpers in nursing homes they work for home health care agencies and they're going to be deported by these native as monsters so we're going to have even bigger shortages there and we're going to have crises and families that of course go well beyond the elderly or the disabled who are in the nursing homes their families are not going to be able to deal with it you have two earners and a family which is what you need in an economy where nominal where wages are rising

“slower than inflation and you have to work just to make ends meet and you've got somebody at home”

who needs somebody to take care of them and you can't do that so you got that now let me add the quadruple whammy just for a minute which is the war on health safety and food safety conducted primarily by its major general Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who's now spending his time instead of sniffing cocaine off a toilet seat or killing animals and doing things with their penises I God knows what is now instead destroying our vaccines and our healthcare system and then we have

Brooke Rollins the Secretary of Agriculture who's completely undermined food safety so we have epidemics of many varieties leading to explosive diarrhea and in some cases death from hysteria or other horrible diseases that have now extended to fruits, vegetables and ice pops and then we have the other eggs eggs and eggs eggs we have the other impact of the immigration crackdown as it were the American Gestapo at work very large shares probably

200,000 undocumented people have been working in meat and poultry processing plants taking

and the industry as manipulated the process so that they are doing an awful lot of the safety

inspection themselves not relying on the poor objective shall we say inspectors so we'll have more of this stuff going on the next pandemic is going to be a catastrophe the flu season where RFK Jr has said don't take the flu shot the flu shot kills more people than the flu he said just as he said the polio vaccine killed more people than polio I mean God knows what animal parts this guy is eaten other than the brainworm other than the cocaine off the toilet seat

that's created this fantasy world of his but all of that put all that together and we're going

“to have a big problem on our hands and of course the fact is that when we have this problem”

in the health care world and the hospitals and the doctors and the insurers are losing some money they're going to turn to the rest of us so our health care costs are going to go up as well of course I didn't even mention the affordable care acts subsidies that went away that took

another 11 12 13 million people off of their health insurance rules so they'll end up in emergency

rooms there you go I got some bad news for you yeah it's worse than that yeah it's no it's like a contest we could have a contest which could it's like yes can you one up this it's uh I I told you my head this friend you said that he wanted to do podcast called

“Alta Cockers and it would be like oh Jewish guys sitting there going oh yeah it's worse than you”

think and but in this particular case norm it's worse than you describe and you describe it extremely well and I encourage everybody to go and read norms article in the new public but

the the reason I say it's worse and and as you know 10 to 15 million you know are going to be

bumped off getting Medicaid coverage 10 15 million not getting uh their subsidies uh hospitals closing war on science war on medicine all that's bad and you're right millions of people will suffer thousands of people maybe more will die but here's the problem this week while you were at the beach some of us were still working the national deficit uh at the national debt passed 40 trillion

“dollars uh it is now at the highest level as percentage GDP has been in many many years”

and it is skyrocketing in part because of the big beautiful bill that you describe which um was you know led to increased deficits and increased spending part because of the war that we're going through and part because of the whole host of other factors well what is the Republican response to that is the Republican response to that we're going to raise taxes we're going to fix the social security system which they think will go bankrupt in a few years um uh we need to ensure that these

systems are solving no is it we have to cut back on the the pennies that were given billionaires no their response to that and they're already talking about it is more cuts to Medicaid more cuts to social security more cuts to Medicare more cuts to social programs like head start and so on and so in other words the squeeze is only just getting started and and and and I have to say as bad as what you describe sounds if the Republicans remain in charge I can only imagine it's going

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imagined such a debt only a president like me could be there presiding over a debt like this aren't I something and you know it's huge you Steve Ratner writes frequently for the New York Times and he did a piece which is really important which is a dozen charts on all of the economic predations that Donald Trump has created and one of the most interesting ones relating to what you just said is looking through recent history from Obama on when it comes to

the national debt and what do we see we see when a Democrat is president the debt

either goes down or stabilizes when the Trump administration came in the first time

just as when the George W. Bush administration came in it balloons and then the Democrats come in

“and deal with it and there's a lot of commentary now which I think is appropriate commentary”

and Paul Krugman had another piece relating to this as others have that you look at the media coverage of this and yet it's there but it's kind of matter of fact it's not like blaring headlines or talk shows that are consumed with the debt and what we're going to do about it when you get a Democratic president in the media go to Defcon 1 over the debt and you know you have

organizations like a committee for a responsible federal budget which have been pretty muted

of late I mean there you know they're saying oh this is terrible we cannot sustain this oh how awful this is but when the Democrat is there they go much harder against this and there's pressure

“from everywhere to do something which includes cutting back on so-called entitlements,”

Medicare Medicaid and Social Security and a little bit but much too little on increasing taxes and they don't even get to taxes on the rich and the what ends up happening and it's terrible is Democrats tend to be the good guys when it comes to economic responsibility and fiscal

responsibility and get punished for it they come in when it's much worse they try to make it better

and they get hit at the polls and in the media for what they're doing yeah you're absolutely right it's a point that I try to make every time that I can make it you made part of the point when we are in a recession it's most likely a Republican president if when we have job creation it's

“most likely a Democratic president when we have stock market crisis most likely a Republican president”

when the deficit goes up Republicans when the deficit goes down Democrats when there is major expansion Democrats when it contracts Republicans this is a pattern that has been going on for decades and decades and decades I dare say for the entire lifetime of everybody is listening to this podcast and yet just as the myth exists the Republicans are good at national security which they are not and we can prove it the same is true that Republicans are better at the economy and they are not

not only are they not better they are worse almost in every category almost in every single time and again I'm sorry you're doing a good job of describing what's wrong but you haven't quite gone far enough and the reason I'm you know I'll work on that I'll work on it work on it it's just you're at the beach and you have the sunny optimism but you know Scott Besant this week has been doing something that nobody's paying a lot of attention to which is he's been intervening

in the bond market and he has been doing it because people don't want to own US treasuries and so interest rates are going up and they've gone up net net quite a bit over the past few years and what they are concerned with is that global investors look at the US and see the kind of faceless mismanagement that we're talking about spending money on wars deficit debt growing and they say I'm not so sure I want to put my money into that and the Japanese and others have

been pulling away from it and you may think you may have said that oh I'm going on going to the

talk when the feds push interest rates up oh what's going to cost the mortgage doesn't really

“directly affect the mortgage, but when when when these markets push up treasuries ultimately”

that pushes up the interest rates that you pay on a mortgage makes it harder for people to buy a house or a car or a car if if they've got you know floating rates on loans and stuff it's it's a problem and this also tends to be a sign of looming market problems and of course we all know that many people are concerned that the markets have been propped up with huge amount of investment and just a handful of AI stocks and that if they hadn't made that investment we would be in a very

down market period but that can stop at any time and so the markets are real skittish right now and I I'm sorry as you know you may find out how I get in and out of my car I've been around long enough to know that when markets get a little dodgy and august hold onto your hats and September and October I've seen it time and time again we've all seen it time and time again and so as bad as things are if there were a market shock it'll just make it that much worse

so let me add a couple of please to this the bond market is much more people are like no that's sure stop no we can't yeah right okay the bond market is much more sensitive to reality than the stock market where the collective judgment of those intervening in the stock market is bonkers every time Trump said this war is over we're got getting the oil back the market went up it meant nothing he was lying it it was absolutely ridiculous and the stock market is inflated now

“because we're getting we have had what I believe is going to be a bubble in artificial intelligence”

data center companies that yeah it's kept they're getting earnings now they're doing IPOs and going up to some degree the bond market doesn't react to those things but there's another important point here which is those interest rates affect what the US government pays for it's to service its debt so the bigger the debt we have the more we have these other irresponsible actions the more people are going to get skittish in the bond market and not by treasuries until

the interest rate goes up enough to make it worthwhile to them all of which means that our debt will grow even faster because of the interactive effect here so they are screwing up everything and so wait a minute so what you're saying is this is not the time to increase the defense budget

by five hundred billion dollars to one point five trillion well that's the wrong thing to do

I'll offer a caveat here we're dealing with you hate America we're dealing with a different kind of warfare in the twenty-first century and gold plated trump class battleships I mean we need to get as many of them as we can buy no matter what they call we need to pimped out the Navy you're absolutely right yeah and then we need to go back to steam power up they should go back to the guys do you

“remember like twenty years ago the show pimped my ride yes I see where they would the guy would”

come in pimped out the car that's the they're going to make him an admiral and he's going to be put in charge of the trump class battleship you know somebody tweeted today this is not the White House that I used to visit it's it's like it's owned by a bond villain and I wrote back maybe we should start calling trump gold finger well that's I that's when Natalie Hart calls him but we're not allowed to talk about Natalie Hart because David Axelrod reprimanded John Ossoff

for bringing up Natalie Hart and you know I just norm I gotta tell you something I have a bias against the odds you know when I listen to people like Axelrod or James Carville it gives me a fucking headache I just want you to know they're like sitting there going oh no don't do this don't do

that we would never have done this do you have any opinion on this maybe maybe maybe you're in the

Axelrod and and and and Carville campus well I will say this I have a soft spot for David Axelrod because for personal reasons he lost his father to suicide when he was a freshman in college

not long after he left the Obama White House was a hugely popular one and we talked a lot about

“this stuff and I appreciate you that you really fucked up my attack on Axelrod you know wait a minute”

I'm not gonna get out so personally I like him and I feel a debt to him having said that what he wrote on this is ridiculous and you know at the same time I have real trouble with the fact that he's buddy buddies with Scott Jennings you know they go on CNN together and then they talk about how they're such good friends so does Van Jones and there was a picture of the two of them at a baseball game and you know that I this leaves me cold because it is it's saying none

of this is real I didn't have heard that Scott Jennings who for those of you don't know

is the most annoying guy in CNN which is saying something and the big defender he actually put together videos of himself defending the administration and sent them to the White House and set up a meeting with Susie Wiles because he wants to replace Caroline love it as the press secretary you know if he gets some plastic surgery to look more like Ivanka he's he'll nail it yeah but you know the Natalie Harp thing to have this woman I mean look I'm not into the sexist

“speculation about what the relationship is I mean publicly probably I think it's an interesting subject”

but but but but I would have to say that you know here is a woman who spends 24/7 with the president who was just revealed and by the way behaves in a very weird way in her obsession with him but it turns out according to the news today she doesn't have a security clearance and hasn't had it she came into the White House in a position where she was in close personal contact with the president and we won't speculate on what that knows no we

other than how it be that she's that she's right by his side on a constant basis which means that whenever he has not that he's reading them but whenever he has top secret and vital documents on his desk she's right there if he ever got a daily intelligence briefing she would be there and we don't allow people to be in the White House without that security clearance well we used to not we used to during the prior Trump administration yesterday didn't have it ifanka didn't have it

I'm sure they're plenty of other people we don't didn't have but see we don't care about that you know we don't put two and two together and note that our enemies are winning or allies are losing one Trump's in charge connection I don't know maybe I'm just being very simplistic so I want to circle back to Axelrod who said well Ossof is great but this is spanish shouldn't have done this I thought what Ossof did was brilliant and one part of this reality

if we had been on this podcast three weeks ago and said okay at home raise your hands if you know who Natalie Harp is my guess is that if we got in a report a very very tiny fraction of our listeners who are and viewers who are after all the smartest and uh most wide ranging of any audience that's and also very good looking and yes but uh now everybody knows Natalie Harp is and now everybody's talking about Natalie Harp and now the stories and the

times and elsewhere of the weird notes she's written to him which you know read like they're

coming from a stalker basically the fact that she jumped into the trunk of the car when they

didn't have room for her when she was going out with the president the fact that Trump sent his

“secretary of state and other key people on this fake air force one plane the decoy where they”

might have been taken out but made sure Natalie was on the decoy plane with him with Trump all of that now is news and the fact that when you take a look at her you're thinking wait is that Natalie Harper is that Ivanka um well that's all of this now and the fact that they've

a prize for this yeah you know Ossoff didn't say anything inappropriate he's simply brought

it up and said he will prefer to fly around with her which you know he did he chose he said you know when he went onto the decoy plane he took I mean onto the onto the the secure plane he took her

“he took uh well nowta who is sort of his body man and I think was dance community he took three”

people with him and he left everybody else in a position of jeopardy but you know it leads to another thing today you had another um person quit the White House wasn't just Caroline Love it it wasn't just the White House Council but since then two or three other people have quit including today I think they had a publicly A's on there is an Exodus that has occurred in a matter of four days and a White House that tried to appear very buttoned down and it it it it seems there is a little

vibe that these things are connected and let's go even beyond that Scott Vicent who you mentioned who best sent I don't care how it's pronounced just say disgusting criminal has lost four of the

“top seven uh people at the Treasury Department the story being that they were concerned that”

the maneuvercy was making with taxes and elsewhere could put them in jail so the sent who has corrupt to the court and who today said gas prices have gone up again I don't know why he said oil prices have gone out I don't know why excuse me yeah and then you've got the other story today you know the the piece that I did on the health care system was about khakisocracy we have uh two stories from Sean Duffy the utterly unqualified incapable and corrupt

Secretary of Transportation you said if you can get into one paragraph khakisocracy and the L word your word licks brittle with this with there are people who will drink a whole you know

“there have a beer in their hand thinking okay that's that's the two for with norm khakis”

tachystric and Sean Duffy the licks brittle yes Sean Duffy the licks brittle who uh in the middle of his tenure as we know went on a reality TV tour of America being away from his job paid for by the companies he regulates but we had two stories one is a video with his daughter who wants to go to Harvard where he said I won't let you go to Harvard because they turn young women into horrible liberal monsters uh in my reaction to that was called child protective services

but the second is they're now having trouble with the company and unqualified company

which they have paid billions to redo the air traffic control system so the next time you're flying don't just think you know of course these are professionals we can rely on them the air traffic controllers are professionals but norm I'm just sorry it's a refrain it's worse than that did yeah did this we're gonna rename this podcast yeah if I'm gonna read it's gonna be called but norm it's worse than that norm did you read Sean Duffy saying with

some pride a couple of days ago that they have solved the problem with the air traffic control is shortage by hiring 2,000 people who are gamers because they think they have the right skills and fast tracking them to become air traffic control so I mean not there are 2,000 gamers who are now in charge of your life as you're flying around in this air traffic control system that is being improved by an unqualified company. Boy it's it's it's worse it's it's just

we're and by the way as a Washingtonian you know people want to know your opinions about Washington

yesterday the Washington Airports Authority approved a $20 billion Trump plan for remodeling

dollars airport which for those of you who want to come to Washington to see norm begins next year and will go for a minimum of seven years this remodeling plan at dollars airport

Palm Beach I'm telling you he's the democrats we may not be able to agree on everything

can keep jeffries he doesn't like the democratic socialist because they want healthcare or something you know they're the moderates don't like the program whatever as democrats we can all agree on one thing and that is that under no circumstances should that airport ever be named after Donald Trump and the thing that would bug him the most would be calling at Barack Hussein Obama International Airport

“and I think we should get behind that so that when it is renovated Obama gets to be invited”

to the airport and congratulate it on its new look um and and and and Trump is nowhere to be seen I think we can all get behind that we get all line up behind that because you know we've been through 10 years of this and as angry as it makes us and as as constructive as it is when people like norm or sometimes me write articles that are full of thought and fact-based or when we get as activists out there to try to produce change that doesn't mean we're not entitled to just a

little bit of being vindicted we're entitled to a little bit of pettiness because this has been so fucking aggravating we're so fucking long uh and these people are so damn annoying and weird

“weird weird people I mean not only harp is a weird person um I I think we're entitled to just”

give me like a dispensation here norm and and allow me a little pettiness you know I think even Pope Leo would give you a dispensation for that yeah no Pope Leo would you know yeah he's one of the best poops as an internet troll that we've ever seen because this guy trolls Trump on a regular basis and he does it so definitely um I it's uh he's definitely my favorite Pope that's no quite well I I'll go back to what I said earlier I'd like to see him as a presidential candidate

nothing says you can't be president and Pope at the same time you know um we should also know that the name Dullis Airport should have been changed a long long time ago that's true there were two Dullis brothers John Foster Dullis who was uh not a great secretary of state and Allen Dullis his brother who headed the CIA and it's a bizarre bit of history as to why the airport was named ostensibly after Allen Dullis but not a person who deserves that particular recognition there are

many others uh who would be far more deserving than that and you know the Obama International Airport but I agree the Brock Hussein Obama International Airport yeah yeah oh for for sure um well you know I guess let me have three minutes I want to there's one other thing that the triggered

me today and I wanted your comment the New York Times and it's never ending effort to

cover the world's fairly it's editorial board put out an article saying Trump's election meddling the roads are democracy like thanks thanks for pointing that out boys and and and then it it has this metric and the metric is where do we stand between democracy and autocracy and it says you know in November 2024 we were at the democracy end of the spectrum and now we've clicked down one two three notches past that but it still leaves us seven notches past autocracy and then on

it's autocracy index it's got a bunch of things like manipulating the law and corruption and using the military and all that stuff and on almost none of these things is it past the middle of the spectrum um I'm using power for personal profit it is that a seven out of ten now Trump made two

billion fucking dollars last year when do you get to attend wait wait that's two billion we know

about right right but it's like you know creating a cult of personality how much further

“do you have to go defying the courts using the military at home but they're trying to be”

tough here but they have got it wrong I mean they're kind of they're kind of the curve is

and had a comment I will say this for the times for those words and there can be very big

“words like the ones you mentioned almost nobody else in this mainstream media other than heroic”

sites like pro-publica or others that we in the past would not have considered a part of mainstream media like the new republic like your column and daily beast like the contrarian

and like deep state radio deep state radio more generally is going to get to that at the end

that's the that's the cherry on top and you know I'll give a real hat tip to some of the people on

“MSNB MS now but if you look at and you know there's some good pieces in the news pages”

of the Wall Street Journal the Washington Post still has some good reporters but its editorial page

is a disgrace it's an utter disgrace so I'll give the times a lot of credit for trying even

if they fall short a lot of times and for being on the right side even if they're not far enough along to reflect the reality of the existential threat that we face every single day and on the corruption front let's go beyond Donald Trump it's even worse it's a weird car family it's the Latinic family which is the disgusting group of people and corrupt people it's every other member of the Trump family it's all the people the criminals who have given him money to get

pardoned and then don't have to pay back their ill gotten gains to the victims of them it's the pedophiles who've been let off or kept from doing anything it is corruption among so many others in his cabinet it's spread widely here so this is not a 10 it's an 11 I'm definitely calling

“this episode no no it's worse than that I think you have earned your walk on the board walk”

you walk to the beach your soft serve cone your twice fried french fries try to eat something healthy though normal blueberry have an egg actually interesting the enough I think I eat healthier out here because you got fresh fish you got you know there's good stuff so I avoid the you know I'm not at like a state fair we're eating fried Oreos or fried butter yeah yeah I don't have it so that's yeah it's like they do like pieces unlike Pete heggsett who was campaigning for

right look yeah you know folks if you showed up in a Pete heggsett for president rally please log off block yourself you know do to get help get out immediately get out of American public like all right enjoy your time at the beach we'll see you next week thank you yeah and you're great as usual you too see you soon okay