Feds Warn Emergency Funds Running Low as Biden Deploys Troops to Southeast

Happy Wednesday!

A federal district court judge today partly unsealed a legal filing by Special Counsel Jack Smith, offering more details about the election interference case against former President Donald Trump. "When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office," Smith and his team allege. Among the revelations in the bombshell legal brief: When an aide alerted Trump on January 6, 2021, that Vice President Mike Pence could be in danger from the rioters at the Capitol, Trump, according to testimony in the case, replied only: “So what?”

Also today, President Joe Biden visited the Carolinas to see the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene and Vice President Kamala Harris traveled to Augusta, Georgia, to survey the storm damage there. Trump reportedly is attending fundraisers in Texas.

Here’s what else you should know.

Biden Deploys 1,000 Troops in Southeast as Feds Warn Emergency Funds Running Low

President Joe Biden traveled to South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia today, to review the damage caused by Hurricane Helene, which killed at least 160 people with a deluge of water throughout parts of the Southeast late last week.

Before leaving Washington, Biden deployed up to 1,000 active-duty troops to the area to help with recovery efforts. They join roughly 6,000 National Guard troops already on the ground in six states.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters that more than 4,800 federal employees have been deployed to the region to assist local officials, with the federal government providing about 8.8 million meals, 7.4 million liters of water and 150 emergency power generators to storm-battered areas.

Mayorkas also warned that the Federal Emergency Management Agency needs more funding. “We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have,” he said. “We are expecting another hurricane hitting — we do not have the funds, FEMA does not have the funds, to make it through the season.”

Although Biden said earlier this week that he might call Congress back to Washington to provide emergency funding, the issue will likely be on hold until after the election. House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday that it will take time to figure out how much damage the storm caused and how much will be needed for relief spending. “We wouldn’t even conceivably have the request ready before we get back in November,” he told The New York Times. “There’s no necessity for Congress to come back.”

5 Quick Takeaways From the Vice Presidential Debate

Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate elicited some words that have rarely been used to describe U.S. political discourse in recent years: civil, cordial, nice.

Sen. JD Vance and Gov. Tim Walz spent much of their time in a rather gentlemanly discussion of policy points that often glossed over significant differences and avoided bare-knuckle attacks on subjects that have come up frequently on the campaign trail. Both candidates also stumbled in response to questions they had to have known were coming. CBS’s “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert summed the evening up fairly well: “These two men were both a heartbeat away … from being interesting this evening,” Colbert joked. “Tonight was like having Thanksgiving with your most nervous uncle and your smuggest nephew.”

1. Vance won on style. The unpopular Republican running mate took advantage of his opportunity to burnish his public image. He delivered a polished, slick and mostly genial sales pitch for Trumpism while also landing critiques of Vice President Kamala Harris. For one night at least, he was more Yale Law than MAGA troll. Walz, by contrast, appeared less comfortable on stage and often struggled to clearly articulate his arguments, stumbling most notably when trying to explain why he had claimed, apparently falsely, to have been in Hong Kong during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing. “I’ve not been perfect, and I’m a knucklehead at times,” he said at one point. Walz also missed or passed up on some opportunities to fact-check Vance or score points in key exchanges.

2. But he ran into trouble on substance. Vance complained about being fact-checked when CBS’s moderators tried to clarify that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are there legally. He also praised some of Harris’s agenda, saying, “Some of it, I'll be honest with you, it even sounds pretty good” before going on to question why Harris hadn’t already enacted her plans while vice president. And he made truly some audacious false claims, most notably that Trump had saved Obamacare and that the former president transferred power peacefully. Walz scored by asking Vance whether Trump had lost the 2020 election. Vance dodged the question. As smooth as he was for most of the debate, that video clip may be one of the lasting, viral moments from this debate. The Harris campaign has already turned it into an ad, running Vance’s answer alongside video from January 6, 2021.

3. The moderators asked about projected deficits. They noted that the Penn Wharton Budget Model has said that Harris’s economic agenda would add $1.2 trillion to deficits over a decade while Trump’s plans would add $5.8 trillion. They asked the candidates how they’d pay for their plans without ballooning deficits.

Walz meandered through some of Harris’s proposals before criticizing Trump’s tax cuts and tariff proposals. He offered this as an answer on paying for Democratic plans: “We'll just ask the wealthiest to pay their fair share. When you do that, our system works best. More people are participating in it, and folks have the things that they need.”

Vance responded by criticizing Harris and defending Trump’s economic record while criticizing the “experts” who advanced neoliberal economic policy over the last 40 years. “If Kamala Harris has such great plans for how to address middle class problems, then she ought to do them now, not when asking for a promotion,” he said, adding that economists who have warned about the effects of Trump’s proposals “have PhDs, but they don't have common sense and they don't have wisdom.” Vance did not specifically address the question of paying for Trump’s plans other than suggesting they’d unleash an economic boom.

4. Viewers were split. A CBS News poll found that 42% of debate watchers said Vance won, 41% thought Walz did, and 17% called the debate a tie. Nearly three-quarters of those polled, 74%, said Walz sounded reasonable, slightly more than the 65% who said the same of Vance. Both candidates saw their favorability ratings rise.

Higher GDP Means (Slightly) Lower Debt-to-GDP Ratio

When the Commerce Department released revised economic data last week, it provided a new basis to calculate the ratio between the size of the national debt and the size of the U.S. economy, a widely used metric known as debt-to-GDP.

According to the number crunchers at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the increase in the size of the economy — which according to the revised data is 1.3% larger than previously thought — means that the debt-to-GDP ratio has decreased slightly, from 99% to 98% by the end of 2024.

“Going forward, debt is also likely to be somewhat lower than projections, though it is unclear by how much,” the CRFB analysts say. “Assuming output remains 1.3 percent above CBO's projections, but spending and revenue don't change, debt would reach 121 percent of GDP (instead of 122 percent) by the end of 2034. If output also grows about a quarter percentage point faster -- as in recent years -- debt would reach 118 percent of GDP. In both of these scenarios, debt would reach a record 106 percent of GDP in 2028 instead of 2027.”

Fiscal News Roundup

• Biden May Face Tough Choices as Port Strike Continues – Washington Post
• Mayorkas Warns of Funding Shortfall for Rest of Hurricane Season – New York Times
• Harris and Trump Are Tested by the Mideast, Helene and the Port Strike in the Campaign’s Final Weeks – Associated Press
• Trump ‘Resorted to Crimes’ After Losing 2020 Election in Failed Bid to Cling to Power, Prosecutors Say – Associated Press
• Special Counsel Jack Smith Provides Fullest Picture Yet of His 2020 Election Case Against Trump in New Filing – CNN
• Who Won the VP Debate? Here's What Debate Watchers Said in CBS News Poll – CBS News
• Like Trump, Vance Wavers on What to Do With Obamacare – New York Times
• On Child Care, Vance Tests a Talking Point Democrats Also Embrace – New York Times
• Vance Takes Post-Debate Victory Lap, Still Declines to Answer if Trump Lost in 2020 – Washington Post
• A Minimum Wage Increase for California Health Care Workers Is Finally Kicking In – Associated Press

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