We’ve been waiting to hear what secret agreements now-Speaker Kevin McCarthy had to make with the Freedom Caucus to become speaker. Yesterday we learned one key condition. McCarthy agreed to pursue something called “prioritization” as part of their plan to push debt default later this year. On its face, prioritization is a scheme by which the U.S. government will simply stop doing various functions — food and safety, Medicaid, roads, school lunches, air traffic control, border security — to prioritize only debt interest payments and likely Social Security and the military. In other words, there’s no need to default on the debt, the argument goes. You basically just default on the U.S. government.
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