mr. bixby: which is really bankruptcy. i mean, it's a form of it. that would be a bad idea also. and so i worry with both houses and a republican president, somehow that kind of bill might get signed. so i think a better approach , would be for trump, ryan and mcconnell, to realize that they have a common agenda. it does require higher borrowing. even if they did not do any -- ryan's budget from last year required a higher debt limit. they didn't acknowledge it. ms. rivlin: they didn't do it. yeah. mr. bixby: so this is a good teaching opportunity for all of the members that think that you can run the government without raising the debt limit. and it could be that the silver lining here is that the three, you know, the leader of the house and senate and the white house, would simply either easily pass a debt limit increase or find some way to, like was suggested, a permanent -- maybe permanently -- >> could you do that? could you permanently -- mr. bixby: you can extend it without a date, sure.

mr. bixby: so there will be certain things in there that we may be debating for the next four to eight years. so the discretionary spending will be very interesting to see what they want to do there. probably hire on defense and lower on defense, although somewhere you have to fit in money for the wall, because they're going to pay for it anyway. there probably won't be an asterisk that says "see mexico." >> oh, why not? we've had asterisks before! [laughter] mr. bixby: and he's got an infrastructure agenda. it's going to be really interesting to see what he puts in there. i mean, the number $500 billion has been floated around. that's going to be rather eye-popping. for republicans on the house side, anyway. so those are interesting. how he accommodates his tax cut is going to be big too. republicans have had a goal of balancing the budget, at least within 10 years. and it seems to me impossible to do that, in the agenda that trump laid out during the campaign, without making sol me really, yo