Anderson Cooper featured Sen. Elizabeth Warren last night to talk about what she expects from the budget negotiations.
"The Republican leadership both in the House and Senate said they are not interested in changes to Social Security and Medicare. Do you believe them?" Cooper asked.
"Well, you know, I don't know what their plan is here. What the president is trying to do, for example, with Medicare is to say we can extend the life of Medicare by just changing how much we're paying the drug companies, negotiating for drug prices and bring down costs for American families," she said.
"You know that $35 cap on insulin was a great down payment and shows Joe Biden doing what Joe Biden does best, and that is out there fighting for working families. What have the Republicans got to offer on that? They've got to offer 2.5 million people being pushed out of work, and that's -- that's bad for our economy and sure as heck bad for those millions of families that lose jobs."
"This is obviously a kind of opening salvo. Republicans haven't put forward their proposals yet. Negotiations haven't begun. President Biden and House Speaker McCarthy have both said today they're willing to meet to begin negotiations," Cooper said.
"With the showdown of the debt ceiling, though, looming do you think the White House and Congressional Republicans can actually find a compromise?"
"The thing is, the Republicans right now are just playing hostage games. So they're saying if you don't do what we want to do, we're going to default on the debt. Now, I had a hearing, a subcommittee hearing this week in which the chief economist from Moody's, Mark Zandi came in and he said if they push us to even a temporary debt default, it's going to push the country into a recession and it's going to cost a million people their jobs," Warren said.
"And interestingly enough, the Republican economists who were there invited by the Republicans agree, and they said we just can't do this on the debt ceiling. But notice the other half. And that is when Moody's crunched the numbers, they said as well if you give in to the Republican cuts into the budget, what that's going to do is push a country into a recession and cost 2.5 million jobs. So either way the Republicans go, either default on the debt even short-term or force these cuts on the economy, both of them put people out of work and push the economy into a recession.
"If the Republicans want to sit down and negotiate, what they want to do is first they want to bring down the national debt, great. How about we ask someone like Jeff Bezos to pay more in taxes than a Boston public school teacher? Because right now, that's all he's paying."
