well there's no deal yet on the national debt ceiling drama but President Biden and GOP house Speaker Kevin McCarthy met again today to continue talks McCarthy reportedly telling Republicans in a closed-door meeting that the two sides are nowhere near a deal yet both leaders though say discussions are productive and there's little time to broker a bipartisan agreement and prevent the U.S from defaulting on its debt all by June 1st it's a move that would impact millions of Americans and cause economic chaos including here in New Jersey where lawmakers are in the final weeks of state budget negotiations and the debt ceiling crisis is now starting to play a larger role than expected for the latest I'm joined by budget and finance writer John reitmeyer hey John so you've been keeping an eye on this hearing today what can you tell me about how much the debt ceiling could affect our finances here yeah definitely Brianna it remains a big wild card so we've heard testimony both from the state treasurer today and also from experts from the nonpartisan office of legislative Services bring this up in the context of these plans for what is the revenue Outlook going to look like in the new fiscal year that begins July 1 and right now no one at the state level is projecting a recession there is a little bit of a a hiccup in revenues compared to where they were at a few months ago but nothing dramatic uh in the big picture of a state that spends more than 50 billion a year but we are hearing more and more that as this continues to go unresolved in Washington D.C it does raise the chances for you know economic turmoil including financial markets and job losses that would dramatically affect the state revenue stream and so increasingly it's something that we're hearing about and being told to keep an eye on and lawmakers are being told to keep an eye on because it has the potential to really dramatically reshape things yeah well certainly just like a budget at home if you don't know what money is going to be coming in makes it tough to plan but interestingly though lawmakers put out a couple of new proposals just within the last 24 hours that seem to be shaking up the discussions what's happening what can you tell us yeah and that that's also true so just today we got a new proposal from Republican members of the Senate talking about using funds that the state has already earmarked for uh paying off debt and and preventing paying debt uh on a pay-as-you-go basis going forward so you don't have to issue new borrowing uh they want to use that to instead give it to County and Municipal governments on a per capita basis the idea that that would be property tax relief because you would prevent those governments from having to pay for these projects themselves and so that's a new proposal we've heard in recent days the assembly speaker discussed uh increased funding for senior property tax relief yes jnj is the name that that he's given that yeah we don't yet have a bill so it's hard to take that too seriously at this point before we know you know how much it would cost who gets what where the money would come from but that's certainly another idea that's been brought into uh this topic you know we're at that point in the budget phase when public hearings are ending and it goes behind closed doors for high-level negotiations between the governor and legislative leaders so it's all all sort of up for discussion at this point but John I'm also hearing rumors that the corporate business tax surcharge which was going to expire at the end of the year is now on the table to potentially be extended to pay for some of those Democratic plans yeah we've heard in the last few days some conflicting messages so I think the Senate President has been on the record talking about uh maybe being open to letting a surcharge which uh has been estimated to be worth a couple hundred million dollars in the the new fiscal year to let that uh it's supposed to expire maybe they would let that remain in place temporarily but we also heard the Senate uh budget committee chairman today uh reiterate that he has been in favor of letting it expire on time so again we're in that phase where we're entering negotiations and a lot of things get discussed we're just gonna have to wait and see what uh the final product is in a few weeks when there's a budget Bill introduced yeah well and we'll note New Jersey has until June 30th to make that happen so a little bit of a longer timeline there John reitmeyer thanks so much you're welcome [Music]