Stuff You Should Know - What's the deal with the debt ceiling?

Episode Date: January 28, 2014

Lately it's been common news fodder that Congress uses its ability to raise the debt ceiling to hold the executive branch hostage to its demands, but exactly how does that work, and what does the debt ceiling do? Learn about it in this fascinating episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast on the top of our show, Brian. And this is Stuff You Should Know, Financial Times edition.

Yeah, and you know what? Usually I shy away from finance, as you know. I know, you're very coquettish. Yeah, this was good though. Like, timely and easy to understand. And I don't think a lot of people, oh, that's not true. I don't know how many people.

I hate when people say that. I don't think many people. Most people don't understand what I understand. But I think if you were like me before, you probably didn't know what the debt ceiling was, and it's really not that difficult. I mean, yeah, I had an idea what the debt ceiling was. I certainly didn't understand the nuts and bolts of it.

And I also didn't understand that it's fairly straightforward, the whole thing. Yeah, or that our company, or our company, how's that for a Freudian slip? Our country, the way they do business, is just, it's kind of staggering. Oh, it's an enormous shell game. It's pretty weird.

That's being held together with duct tape and bubble gum. Yeah, it's disheartening and frightening and all that stuff. So Chuck, the debt ceiling has been around for a while, and we'll talk about the history of it in a little while, but it really kind of came into focus in 2011. There was a big fight over raising the debt ceiling, which to that point had happened more than a hundred times

since the beginning of the 20th century. And it had been routine at any given point in time. Like it was just, the debt ceiling needs to be raised. Congress says, okay, raise it, and that's that. In 2011, thanks to a faction of the Republican Party known as the Tea Party, this very normal procedure, or routine I should say procedure, of raising the debt ceiling was basically held up.

And therefore the function of government was basically held hostage. And it happened again in 2013 to even greater effect. But what's crazy to me after understanding and investigating what the debt ceiling is and what's going on, I'm chilled to say that I understand it from both sides now. Like I get where both sides are coming from

and why the debt ceiling is this, it is literally the fulcrum on which the entire federal government, the entire country, and not just the operations of the government, but the whole U.S. economy, and in turn the global economy sits, rests. And if you hold up the debt ceiling, you hold the entire global economy hostage.

If you hold up the process of raising the debt ceiling? Yes. Okay. I thought you meant hold it up like a buttress. If you hold, yes, if you're doing that, then your back hurts. Yes. But that's the point.

That's why it was pretty shrewd to target the debt ceiling, but it's not just shrewdness. Like I understand that the people who held it up were characterized as political terrorists. I think even if you take that aside or not, it was pretty smart to target that. Sure. Not just because that's a great thing to hold hostage,

but because you can make a case like therein is the greatest symbol or functional symbol of all of the problems that are plaguing the United States today, or the solution to all of its problems. Man, you are right down the middle on this one, aren't you? I truly understand it from both sides. It's really weird.

I think that's a healthy perspective. I guess so. And maybe that's what it is. I'm like, oh, I feel healthy. Healthy perspective. Yeah, it definitely beats hardline partisan views on things, I think, when it comes to something this huge and complicated.

Right. Well, the irony is that the people who were holding it up are about as hardline partisan as you can get. Yeah. You know? Yeah. But the prospect of attacking the debt ceiling and focusing light on it is, I think,

a very smart move politically. Yeah. It may not make friends on the playground. No, it definitely will not. But it is effective. Yeah. OK, so Chuck, let's talk about this. Let's talk about the debt ceiling.

Let's talk about the federal government in general and how it operates. Yeah, there's a thing that I didn't know existed until recently that is issued every day called the Daily Treasury Statement. And if while we're doing this, this sounds just like a company or just like even your own personal finances. Yeah.

Because it is. It's just a lot more zeros. Exactly. A lot more zeros. But it's the principles the exact same. Yeah. The Daily Treasury Statement is basically just the balance sheet of what we spend in a day as a government

and what we take in in a day. So let's just pick a day at random that's featured in this article. OK, let's say October 3. OK, October 3 of last year. Not too long ago. It's a Thursday. The sun was shining here in Atlanta.

The federal government took in about $110 billion in revenue. We are in Los Angeles. Yeah, the sun was shining there. Yeah. Took in about $110 billion from things like massive amounts of taxes that we have to pay. Yeah. My words.

Bailout loan payments from TARP. Yeah. Selling old jet planes and things and guns to other countries. Yeah. About $27 million made on that day alone. Yeah. And then we spent $143 billion. So if we took in $110 and we spent $143 billion.

And we spent $143 on hundreds, if not thousands, of programs. Sure. Just all sorts of everything from Social Security, which I think made up the lion's share of the spending that day, which was $24 billion, down to tax refunds. Yeah, and not just programs, but the electric bill at the White House. Right, exactly.

Paying the private and the army. Yes. Like, you know, everything the government pays for. Right. Which includes a lot of programs. Right. So that is a difference of $33 billion in that one day. A bad, a negative difference.

Right, so that's a deficit. It's a deficit. On that day, we ran a deficit. Which is not unusual. OK. $33 billion deficit on October 3, 2013. OK, so the rest of the 364 days of that year, fiscal or otherwise, fiscal or calendar.

Even if we didn't, let's say we had a day where we ran a surplus. Yeah. You take all of those together. You take your surpluses and your deficits for all those days. And you add them up. And you have whether you have a surplus or a deficit for the year.

If everything equals out, you have what's called a balance budget for that year. Which just doesn't happen. Not very frequently, no. I don't see. I haven't seen any balance. I've seen like a surplus. There's been some surplus here and there.

For the most part, though, we've been in a deficit, especially since, well, for many, many years. Well, I've got some numbers, actually. Let's see. In 1993, and this, I'm not saying this president is good, this president is bad, because Congress and the House have probably more to do with it than a president does. Well, not only that, it's possible some presidents

have inherited the benefits of policies from other presidents. But economists don't know. Yeah. It's very contentious, too, man, when people start. I read a few articles. It's really pretty interesting to see people's takes on the economies of a presidency. But in 1993, regardless, Bill Clinton inherited a $255

billion deficit. And starting in 1998, we had the first budget surplus since 1969. And then two years later in 2000, we hit the high watermark of $236 billion surplus in 2000. Which is, I mean, that's mind-boggling these days. Yeah. Oh, man, to think about that.

That means that the government, after paying all of its bills, still had $236 billion left over. Yeah, and people today still are like, Clinton got lucky because the internet boom. Or no, Clinton's policies were wide. Or no, it was the Republican-controlled House and Congress. Right, that forced him.

It was kind of a lot of stuff. I think the rational approach is, it was a lot of stuff. Regardless, those were great years. And then, so in 2000, a $236 billion surplus, Clinton left office with $127 billion surplus. And just a year later, we had $157 billion deficit. And by the time Obama came into office in 2009, we had a $1.2 trillion deficit.

When he came into office. Yes, and now it's at about $759 billion, depending on what numbers you look at. That's just the deficit, not the national debt. OK, all right. So this is a very big point of clarification that we need to make. That's the annual budget, right?

Yeah, that's the deficit. Now, when you take all of those annual budgets over all the years, all the money we've ever owed, all the money we've ever came out on top with, and you put it all together, you have what's called the national debt. Yeah, that's basically the money we borrow to cover those losses.

If we ever had, if you ever took all of those years together and we had a surplus, then you would call it the national surplus. I don't think that's ever happened or ever will happen. I don't think that's ever happened. The national surplus. Yeah, since we started borrowing money. Even though we've had budget surpluses.

Right, yeah. Because, let's say, we've had a good year, $250 billion surplus year. That's a great year. But we also maybe had $5 trillion in national debt that that had to be thrown at, right? So when you take all of those deficits and all the surpluses and you add them all together, what you come up with

is how much in the whole of the United States is, and that is the national debt. And as it stands right now, it's at about $17 trillion 282 billion, $575 million, $0.44,000, $755 and 35 cents. That's as of January 21, 2014. And with every minute getting more and more. So tired now than it was when you read it. Which is a pretty significant amount.

Yeah. Especially if you consider that in 2000, it was at about $5 trillion. Yeah, you know a number is bad when you have to look at it from right to left and count the zeros. Like, I got to see what the thousands, the millions, the billions, okay, oh, that's trillions. Right.

So if you think about that, I mean think about that Chuck. In just 14 years, like we've gone up well over $12 trillion in debt, $12 trillion, our national debt has increased by that much. And so now we kind of come to my intro again if you'll indulge me for a second. If you look at the increase, right, of course there were two wars that we thought.

Yeah, their wars are very expensive. That definitely did, that didn't help anything at all. Yeah, and Clinton was not at war, so that was a lot of people to say, you know, those were eight peaceful years. I think they call it a peace, peace dividend. Okay, yeah. Yeah. Clinton preferred the surgical airstrike.

That was his big thing rather than troops and relying on NATO. But so wars, they cost quite a bit of money. So we were fighting not one but two wars. Then all of a sudden you have the global markets just go into the toilet. And now all of a sudden you have a lot of people who are unemployed, which means your tax revenue goes down. And you have in office a president who believes in spending

your way out of a crisis, a debt crisis. And this is why the Tea Party hijacked the debt ceiling. Because a lot of people are saying, we don't agree with you. There's a lot of people who believe in austerity, which is you cut government spending to get your way out of a crisis. And if you look at Greece, that pretty much proved that you can't do that, that it will just completely destroy your economy and possibly your entire government.

Right. And that was actually based on a paper by a couple of economists who came out with this data that any government whose debt to income ratio was 90 percent, if your debt was 90 percent of your GDP, you didn't grow as fast. And so all of a sudden you had all these people saying austerity, austerity. And then it turned out that this grad student from, I believe, NYU got a whole of the original data set and basically saw that they didn't carry a zero and got an incorrect thing and the government of Greece almost toppled because of this

incorrect paper. Oh, that was why? Yeah. Wow. But at the time, there were a lot of people saying, well, first of all, we don't agree with deficit spending as a means of getting out of an economic problem. But also you have some other people saying, maybe that works, maybe it doesn't, history hasn't proven that yet.

We still think as $12 trillion increase in the national deficit is too much. So we need to curb this runaway spending. And one way to do that is to target the debt ceiling. Yeah. The debt ceiling, I don't think we've even said specifically, is basically the maximum amount of deficit that we can incur. Yeah. And we literally, it's got a ceiling.

When we borrow or when we have a deficit that hits that, we're at the debt ceiling and the only way to change that is for Congress, like we said, to raise the debt ceiling, which has happened. How many times? I think at least 100 times since it started. Well, since 1960, they voted 78 times. So let's call that modern times. Yeah.

Because, okay, so no matter what your politics are, no matter what's going on, no matter who's president, this is the way the federal government is set up. You have a bunch of money going out, you have a bunch of money coming in, usually in the form of income tax or like you said, selling old fighter jets or that kind of thing. And the amount you have coming in very, very rarely exceeds the amount you're putting out. So there's two things you can do. You can increase your income or you can cut your spending. And raise taxes.

Right. So the... Well, increasing the income by raising taxes. Right, exactly. Yeah. Or you can cut your spending. We have two political parties. One is completely attached to not increasing taxes.

Yeah. The other one is completely attached to not cutting spending, especially on entitlement programs. Yeah. So it doesn't matter who's in office these days. The way that things operate is you just go borrow more money. That's how you fund the government. Yeah.

That's how it's been done. That's how you've gotten around the politics to this point. Yeah. And Congress could erase that by, like you said, raising taxes. That's not popular. Right. Or cutting spending. And that's not popular.

That's not popular either. So it's really kind of a bad situation. So what we have is the U.S. Treasury which issues debt. That's right. The U.S. Treasury securities to people, regular old schmoes, well, not regular old schmoes. No, we can borrow. Well, that's true. That's true.

Yeah. You can go buy a U.S. Treasury bond. Banks, corporations, governments. It's basically a very low interest rate loan and up until recently, a very, very safe one. Right. And you would still think it's pretty safe, but that could go off the cliff. It could.

But the big problem in October of 2013 is a lot of people were saying, like, we're going to default on our loan obligations. Yeah. We'll get to that though. Okay. All right. Because that's the bad news at the end. Right.

This is the bad news in the middle. China and Japan, for instance, each own more than a trillion dollars in Treasury securities as of July of last year of 2013. Right. So a lot of people borrow money from the United States at pretty low rates. I think it's worth explaining again. Like a Treasury bond is you, Chuck, going to the U.S. government saying, here, I'll give you some money.

You give me a promissory note that says you'll repay it with a little bit extra. The big. Right. At the end, when this thing matures. And the government says, thanks, we're going to take this money and we're going to use it to pay our bills. Yeah. Because Congress is going over and saying, yes, we want to keep our national parks open

and we want to, we want to fund, like, Social Security, whatever. And we have bills to pay. So thanks for the money. We're going to pay the bills. Yeah. Because that's what Treasury does. Congress spends the money. Treasury pays the money.

Yeah. And if you're under debt ceiling, then it's. It's all good. Yeah. It's fine. Just figure out a way to pay the bills. And it's just like a big company. And Treasury also has more than one financial security.

They have all sorts of ones that mature at different times and all that. And they, they do a pretty good job of figuring out how to raise money. Yeah. But the problem is, for every Treasury bill that they sell, Chuckers, that's that much more in debt. Yeah. The federal government has just gone. Yeah.

Okay. With the debt ceiling, like you said, there is a certain limit to the amount of outstanding debt the Treasury Department can issue. Yeah. And it's just like a credit card limit to an extent. Yeah. And there's one pretty big difference is, but it is a helpful way to think about it because most people have credit cards.

But the bank sets your credit card limit because they say, Josh, you know, you're risky as a spender. We don't want to give you a credit card more than like 10 grand, let's say. Yeah. So the bank puts the cap on it there. On the other side of the coin, foreign governments that buy Treasury securities are like, I'll take all you got basically. Right.

So it's a reliable investment and the credit limit is imposed by the borrow instead of the lender. Right. That's the big difference with your credit card. It's the person lending you the money that wants to say that says, no, you can't borrow anymore. With the debt ceiling, it's us saying, no, we can't go borrow anymore. We could issue as much as we wanted and people would buy T-bills all day long because they're

so safe. That's right. Supposedly. Or at the moment they are. All right. You want to talk about the history a little bit? Well, hold on. Check.

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Okay. And now we are talking about the history of the debt ceiling, right? I think that's where we left off. Yeah. So back in the day, Congress used to be a little tighter with this, a lot tighter. In fact, we could not sell securities without explicit approval. Treasury wanted to borrow some money, so Congress would say, hey, what kind of security should we sell, large or small?

What should the interest rate be? How many should we sell? And they kind of worked it out that way up until war in 1898, the War Revenue Act of 1898 basically said, you know what, in times of war, we need to loosen the chains a little bit and let's say we can borrow up to $500 million by selling these securities to fund the war. To fund the Spanish-American war, right? Yes.

And then after that, they were like, okay, that works, but let's just leave that be. And then there was World War I and there was the First and Second Liberty Bonds Act, which basically did the same thing to help fund World War I. And it worked really well and the secretaries of the Treasury, I think Andrew Carnegie? No, Mellon. Andrew Mellon. Yeah. You can understand why I would be confused there.

And Henry Morgenthau later on in the 1920s and 30s basically said, why not just do this to fund the government as a whole instead of just in times of war? And now today, if you could go back and sit down with him, you could say, because it gets out of control when you do that. Because it's cray. Right. But they got, was it Franklin? Yeah, FDR.

Yeah. They got Roosevelt on board and they got Congress to pass this for the first time ever an aggregate debt limit, which is all the debts that the U.S. owed. Yeah. As long as it was beneath a certain amount, the Treasury could do whatever it wanted to pay its bills, as long as it didn't need to borrow any more than that. And that was the first time that a debt ceiling was ever set in 1939, I think. Yeah, 39.

And that was, it's pretty similar to kind of the debt ceiling that we have today. Not too different. Right. Congress approved spending. Treasury figures out how to pay for it all. As long as you're under that, it's all good. The problem is when you bump up against it, like we've been doing over and over again lately, it seems like.

Yeah. So, like you said, that is a problem. You just vote to raise it. Yes, and again, this has been pretty routine 100 times since the 1930s, 1940, 100 times this thing has been lifted. And you just say, okay, well, just go issue some more debt. People want the debt. Yeah.

People want to lend us money. So, go issue some more debt and we can keep paying our bills because here's the thing with the debt ceiling. When you raise the debt ceiling, a lot of people are like, well, if you don't raise the debt ceiling at curb spending, that's true indirectly. What the Treasury is doing is paying for stuff that we've already received on credit, whether it's meals for soldiers from a private contractor to a bunch of like Boeing jets, whatever. We've already received these things and now Treasury has to pay.

So if you don't extend the debt ceiling, then you're defaulting on payments you have to make, bills you have to pay. Yeah. Just like your credit card. Exactly. And that's not good. And it's kind of the same thing happens really. If we default, well, here's what happens if we don't raise the debt ceiling and we are

in danger of defaulting. Defaulting would basically start raising all other interest rates across the board. Well, like home loan rates, basically anything your average Joe would go out and get a loan for, your rates are going to go up. Right. And the reason why is because the 10-year Treasury note is what the home loan rates are tied to. And if the value or the credit rating of a T-bill goes down, then the people who are

lending money and return for a T-bill are going to be able to say like, yeah, I'll give you some money, but you're a little more risky than you were before. So I want to hire a percentage rate in interest, which means it's more expensive for the government to borrow money. And if the percentage of interest goes up on the T-bill, anything that's attached to that like home loans, business loans, go up as well, which means what? Well, that means everybody suffers. Exactly.

And the whole country goes into an economic drag and maybe even worse. Yeah. It could get a lot worse. But that thing I sent you from Forbes? Yeah. So a lot of people were saying in October, like out going over or defaulting on our debt, that's not that big of a deal. You remember that?

It is a really big deal. It's a colossal deal. It doesn't matter what your politics are. One thing that could happen is we could actually lose our triple A credit rating, which would be horrible. It would be horrible because people who buy T-bills would be able to say, I want to hire interest rate. Yeah.

They'd still want to borrow the money. They would just stick it to us. Right. But the thing is to make it more attractive because fewer people would want to borrow money. So to make it more attractive, the government would have to raise the interest rate on what it paid back. Right?

Yeah. Also, the T-bills, if everything just went off the cliff and the government said, you know what? We can't pay back this debt, any T-bill you hold would be as valueless as any other T-bill. No one would know what they were maybe going to eventually repay, what was worth what. So they would all in effect become worthless. The problem is not only do entire federal or foreign governments rely on T-bills for their reserves.

Yeah. So do banks. Banks also use T-bills as collateral for overnight loans. Yeah. Sometimes companies cash them in because they need to be more liquid. Right. So there's a lot of use of T-bills that's totally entrenched in the economy. If all of a sudden they went valueless because the government defaulted on its loans obligations

on its debt, then that would be that. Like the entire banking system would lose at least a third of its collateral, its reserves, and they would actually probably be holding these things illegally so they'd have to get rid of them. So they'd be selling these things off for whatever they could and a genuine collapse of the markets where as this forewriter puts it, it would make what happened in 2008 after the Lehman debacle look like a children's exercise. It would be catastrophic.

Cats and dogs living together. Exactly. Mass hysteria. Yeah. And that's really not hyperbole. Like that's obviously the worst case scenario, but the point is these T-bills are so entrenched in the global economy, they'd just be, if they became valueless, so too would the global economy.

Yeah. I wonder how you regain your credit rating. I don't know or how long it takes. Sure. It's probably much the same as an individual, you know. So one thing that would happen if we decided not to raise the debt ceiling is Congress would have to operate within a budget, which means the things that we were talking about before like huge spending cuts or raising taxes.

Both probably. Or both. That's just tricky politics, people would get upset like what programs do you cut, whose taxes do you raise, it's just a very dangerous game. They'd be very, very deep cuts too. And the problem is, is anytime the federal government makes huge cuts, so too do corporations and then all of a sudden unemployment goes up, so you have to raise taxes even further because there's fewer people who are employed paying taxes.

Or they may fall onto the teeth of the government as well. Because they're unemployed. Should we be worried? No. Because they're going to vote to raise the debt ceiling. Every time. Yeah. There's no way that they would ever default, it would just be too, again, catastrophically

bad. Yeah. I think though you could be worried about continuing on like this. Yeah. I mean, it has to pay, you've got to pay it at some point down the road. Yeah. You know, there was one thing we didn't quite touch on that I think really kind of reveals just what a big shell game this is, right?

So again, if you don't want to raise taxes and you don't want to cut programs, you just go to the Treasury to get more money. Yeah. Well, if the Treasury doesn't have that much more money, you can also go to your own accounts and take whatever you can. So Social Security, for example, is a trust fund and you're not allowed to take from Social Security except to a certain amount, right? So say Social Security at any time has to have $2 billion, whatever, that's a ridiculously

low number. Yeah. Let's say it's $2 billion. And then one day, Social Security has $2 billion, $100 million in its accounts. Federal government takes that extra $100 million because it's over and above the legal mandate and then uses it for whatever else. Right. Well, it gets Social Security from payroll, right?

From payroll taxes through you being employed. So it's another that's basically like a hidden tax that's like a hidden way of generating revenue, increasing Social Security tax isn't actually helping Social Security. It's helping fund the government that's just like hemorrhaging money left and right. It sounds like the old saying, robbing Peter to pay Paul. That's exactly right. Yeah. That's what Al Gore was talking about in the 2000 election with the famous lock box thing,

like put Social Security in a lock box. Yeah. Like if it has a surplus, you can't touch it. Right, right. And then that way, Social Security will be able to actually pay for the people it's supposed to in 30 years rather than being robbed to fund the federal government, which won't either raise taxes or cut spending or both. Yeah.

I think most people, I don't know when it's going to happen, but at some point, someone's not going to get their Social Security that they paid into it. Oh, yeah. I think we're definitely in that generation. You think so? Yeah. I don't think it's going to keep going on much longer. Or if we do, it'll be such a paltry amount that it'll just be laughable.

Right. Not like other people getting rich off Social Security now. Well, I mean, there's no, and you certainly can't just live on it. Right. I mean, you can, I'm sure, in certain parts of the country, but for most people, it's a supplement to something, but I think it would just be like 50 bucks or something for us. Yeah.

Who knows? I'm depressed. Don't be depressed. Why? Take action. Well, yeah, by taking care of your own personal finances in spite of the government. Yeah, I guess so. But I mean, yeah, it's weird.

And this one is, I think it's great because everybody's involved, like all political factions are involved in this. And everybody has an opinion, you know, like of how to do this best. But I feel like, aside from the people who are ready to push us into default, everybody has an understanding like, this is a very fragile game of Jenga going on right now. And we could conceivably go on like this, but it'd be better to fix it, but we need to do it surgically. Yeah.

Jenga, that's a good analogy because the wooden tower feels like it could topple at any moment. Yeah. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Hard podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. And so tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Attention, bachelor nation, he's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new tell all podcast, the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope.

But I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all. And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and preparing this, moving forward and letting everybody hear from me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this and I have a lot of thoughts.

I think about this every day, truly every day of my life. I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay. So you got anything else? Nope. All right.

Well, that was the debt ceiling. If you want to learn more about it, you can type those words into the search bar, howstovework.com. Since I said search bar, which means it's time for listener mail. That's right. I'm going to call this shout out to my GMO, or as he calls her, Mamo, his grandmother. Hey guys, I had your How Dying Works podcast, my playlist for quite some time now, afraid to listen to your take on what is happening in my life at the moment. I lost my father to a rare form of cancer at the beginning of the summer and I'm currently

caring for my grandmother who's in the closing days of her life. I'm an avid listener and when the title appeared on my podcast list, I began to avoid the topic. I decided to finally listen to your take on the end of life today and I have to let you know how much I appreciated your take on death and dying. It's a topic that is never far from my mind these days and I found the information you provided both informational and uplifting. Thanks for informing me that death is a process, not an event. I got a lot of information, as I always do from your show, but a surprising amount of

comfort and reassurance. I also know you guys don't do shout outs a lot, but I took the challenge at the end of the show seriously. Would like to ask if you'd give a shout out to my grandmother, Mamo, who was the person who originally instilled the curiosity and love of learning and me that led me to your podcast in the first place. Please let her know how grateful I am for all the things she's given me and caring for her at the end of her life is the greatest gift I could ever ask for.

That is from Chris Howell. So Mamo, I hope you're still with us and listening. Thank you for raising an awesome grandson and instilling that curiosity. And Chris, if Mamo is no longer with us, then Godspeed, I hope that end process was comforting. Nice somehow. Very nice Chuck. Yeah. Thanks, Mamo.

That was a great one. Yeah, it was a good one. If you have some nice email that will knock our socks off like that, you can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us a regular old email to stuffpodcastediscovery.com and you can hang out with us at our website. It's called stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

With over 100,000 titles to choose from, Audible.com is a leading provider of downloadable digital audio books and spoken word entertainment. Go to audiblepodcast.com slash no stuff, K-N-O-W-S-T-U-F-F to get a free audio book download of your choice when you sign up today. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the New I Hard Podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot

sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I Heart Radio App, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.