their life expectancies. but what i do you think is that with the majority of the population seeing increases in retirement, age will likely increase in the coming years. that will probably not impact people already on the program, but it will impact people who are maybe 10 years, 20 years, 30 years away from retiring and need to take that into consideration for their long-term financial planning. host: stephen in illinois, independent line, good morning. caller: pedro, good morning. thank you, always nice to hear from you. i am 77 years old and i receive benefits from social security and medicare. i would not be of any objection to the tweaking of those programs. however, what always rubs me the wrong way is the government subsidies to farmers, businesses, and whomever else. the free money going to people that really don't need it.

the tax cuts for the very wealthy, where rich people don't pay their fair share. that's the problem. nobody wants to give up their share of the pie when other people don't. i think my only suggestion to the problem is, there should be tweaking to programs such as social security and medicare, and straight, automatic cuts, whether it be 3% or 4% across-the-board in spending. the democrats should demand that there be tax increases for the rich, which i will bet my house on that the republicans will never agree to. thank you for listening to me. host: stephen from illinois. guest: that's a good idea. we definitely need more revenue coming in, as i said, and a reduction in standing. i'm not sure across-the-board cuts are as effective. we need to realize their programs providing much more value than others and some are

run much more efficiently than others. but i wholeheartedly agree that there is chaff in government programs that we can look toward reducing. we need to be targeting resources on people who need them the most. for example, recent student loan action, forgiving student debt for all student borrowers across-the-board, which is now tied up in the courts, that is not a well targeted policy. there are many people that have graduate degrees, who are going to have very high earnings in the coming years, certainly later in their careers, who don't need a handout of $10,000 from the federal government to repay some of that debt. they are going to get a large dividend from the education they paid for. with that policy and many others, both sides have implement it over the year, i think the 2016 tax cuts, we certainly didn't need some of those tax cuts irate -- higher income individuals received. there are things on both sides peered what we need to do looking forward is figure out

where in the spending programs and tax code we can target benefits more toward people who need them and ask more out of the people who can most afford it. host: this call comes from victor in florida, independent line. caller: good morning, favor -- pedro, mr. aqaba's. some people stole my thunder. if you don't mind, could i mention a couple of things about your last caller? he said a couple of things that, pardon me, pistol me off a little bit. like the platinum coin printing. why can't i just grab a piece of paper and put a 1 and a couple of zeros after it? stupid things like this need to be removed from the laws that we have passed. that is something that i think so many of us are upset about. there is a tremendous amount of waste. this whole thing about congress isn't perfect, or they say a lot

of no, then at the end of the year, they say yes and pass the bill. the bills, yes, they pass. they are bad bills. it simply shouldn't happen. how about this new gentleman who has just lied his way into congress? they are now saying that the reason he wanted to run for congress is so he could get free health care. i was a registered nurse for 30 years and i just retired. i don't have free health care. why should congress be awarded these huge benefits that every day john public doesn't get? i'm just upset seeing these politicians saying no, we can't do this, we can't do that. it's not right. there are tons of ways to save money. host: ok, ok. victor finishing us off in florida. anything for that mr. akabas?

guest: we have far too much polarization in society and politics today. that is one thing the bipartisan policy tries to help with. we just celebrated a for the anniversary of the congressional exchange paired with two members of congress visit each other's districts. i heard from more than a dozen members who were there. i think we had 40 or so of those trips go back and forth, where members get to see the constituents and the districts of a congressperson on the others to the aisle. it really helps open their eyes to their vantage point, their perspective. many of these pairings have actually worked on bipartisan dissolution since they have taken those trips together. it's not going to fix our entire system, but there are programs like that and folks who are trying to push the two sides to work together on problems. as we have been talking about today, that is ultimately part of the longer-term solution here. the two sides are talking and

developing solutions. if we don't have that rapport with each other, things will never be fixed. host: shai akabas of the bipartisan policy center. you can check out some of the work that they do.powered by ca. >> "washington journal" continues. host: looking at the week ahead in washington, the bloomberg news congressional reporter is joining us. kevin mccarthy said he will sit down wednesday with president biden to talk about issues of the debt limit and the like. what are the positions of the two men and what does that mean going into the conversation? guest: the most important thing that happens this week. joe biden's position is the position that barack obama had in his second term which is that he will not negotiate concessions for releasing the hostage of the debt limit.

kevin mccarthy, the new speaker, new house says you got to negotiate. that's how are democracy works and we've got to find compromises and we need to try to cut spending, reduce the deficit and come to an accommodation and a deal and what the republicans want ultimately is a deal that lays at a path to a balanced budget. when you have $1 trillion in deficits, that's not likely to happen in the next few months. a lot of times, these negotiations start off with each side saying no at each other and then you get more and maybe you get closer to a deadline and people start getting upset at market start reacting and eventually, you get to some kind of accommodation. it's possible that other things get added to the debt limit like a bill and maybe the democrats

will get some things and republicans will get some things. this is something that will be basically of big topic for the next several months until june when the first moment when we might actually hit that cliff. host: we some mitch mcconnell say last week that they seem to be staying out of it. guest: that's what he did in 2011 back when john boehner was there with the new house. they were intent on cutting the deficit and they wanted to pass a balanced budget amendment to the debt limit, it was much more ambitious than what kevin mccarthy is talking about which is a more modest cap deal on spending. i think mitch mcconnell is in the wings and if the house is unable to get its act together and unable to pass anything, there is a chance that

macconnell in the end could pick up the phone to joe biden and try to craft a deal that they think may enough folks in the house would fix it up. host: you and others at bloomberg had a story published about the options that the government may consider when taking care of these issues so what's the genesis of this story? guest: a lot of folks have been talking about ways to bypass the house of representatives. it's very inconvenient with a house of representative that disagrees that you don't want to raise the debt limit. people are saying you could raise cash to keep paying the bills, one of which has been popular is minting platinum coins and there's an old law from decades ago that gives the secretary of the treasury to mint platinum coins of any dim emanation to theoretically meant a trillion dollar coin.

then the federal reserve can credit our account and we can keep paying the bill. her problems with that. you have to figure at how to not have that affected by inflation. it's not really a great thing for economies around the world and it shake confidence in u.s. credit. it's not a great option but it is theoretically possible with another option called premium bonds. this is a way to disguise the size of the debt. you basically would say we will issue new bonds we will pay an extra 100% or something in interest on those bonds. the value that investors would put on those bonds would be higher and they would pay a giant premium but that won't count against the -- against the debt limit. theoretically, you could find --

finance lots and lots of bonds. it's kind of a shell game and the $31 trillion debt would look smaller but in reality, you are in the exact same financial position, you still owe the $31 trillion, you've just gone through some games to look at dez to make it look smaller and you would potentially also have the rest of the world saying is is not really we dish the economy we all put our money in. there is a potential that could cause higher interest rates because people would have less confidence. host: that story is on the bloomberg website. you can call and ask questions.

legislatively, bills that could be debated this week both deal with the pandemic, one would in the public health emergency and the national emergency declared by president trump relit -- related to covid-19 so what's the messaging behind these bills? guest: basically, the house republicans have several goals related to this and they are trying to say that the pandemic is over, that we should not still be using emergency authorities 2020, that federal worker should have to show up for work, they want to revert to the leap policies of 2019. a lot of federal workers are working from home these days. they call it does show up to work act. there is also one on vaccine mandates on health care workers.

these are all things that republicans have been talking about campaigning on. the problem for them is they only have the house. most of these things are not going anywhere in the senate and even if they did, if you are repealing an executive order, you need an executive to sign your bill or else you need 2/3 to override. they don't have that. it's going to be interesting to see when people put out their pressed releases in their fundraising emails. you see that when the new house takes over. we've done all these things but until you actually accomplish a law, then it's just a well organized press release. that's for things like the debt limit and the big-budget fight later this year when the year

expires september 30 and that to pass a law to give the government operating after that and a lot of these things are going to be in those fights. those are the two moments where you hit the debt limit and funding cliff where republicans have some leverage and they intend to use it. host: let's hear from our viewers, daly city, california, democrats line. caller: good morning. i wanted to talk about the media, am i too late? host: that was the previous segment but if you question about what's ahead in washington this week, go ahead. caller: washington will always play its games and credit is that it and they are using it in america. they are always poor. that's my opinion for that, thank you. host: thank you. guest: when it comes to the u.s.

credit, we have something called the 14th amendment where section four of that amendment says the edit of the united states shall not be west you and. it was passed after the civil war were there was some question how they would pay back civil war bonds and they wanted to put it rest to that. there are folks on capitol hill who say we would not default on our debt because of that, the treasury secretary would prioritize paying back debt coupons. that is untested and it's kind of a risky thing to pay because we have a very -- the federal budget is very lumpy. we have some days when $50 billion is going out for social security checks and other days when money is going up or medicare and other days where you have to met -- make these debt coupon payments and those days don't always correlate when people pay their taxes. we have some months where we have surpluses and some months where we have giant