a long time South Jersey political boss is Making Waves this week George Norcross the most powerful unelected Democrat in New Jersey says he's stepping back from politics after a disastrous 2021 election season that tossed his ally former Senate President Steve Sweeney to the sidelines Norcross says his nearly three decade run of the Party Machine is over or is it senior political correspondent David Cruz reports so John obviously we weren't expecting necessarily a breakthrough in these conversations between the president and the speaker of the house but uh are we any closer to avoiding a default on the debt ceiling you have really good question uh we probably don't know enough now it's probably a good sign that they did speak face to face and are both signaling that default is is sort of not a direction that any of them really want to land in um I think if you read some of the analyzes that have come out since the meeting maybe the optimistic take is that there were a few items that the president sort of nodded that he might be considering one would be a way to avoid the limit if they do have an impasse and one would be maybe ways to find compromise and just the fact that he is willing it seems to talk about the federal budget remember that the debt ceiling is for spending that's already been sort of incurred by the federal government but because we spend some backed by borrowing the two issues are somewhat linked even though the debt limit is for past spending the budget talks would be for future spending so maybe we did see some some areas where there's potential compromise but yeah you know certainly they didn't come out arm and arm but the fact that they're talking is probably a good thing not even close to being arm and arm I mean but when you have uh the treasury secretary Janet Yellen saying there are no good options if we can't pay our bills Jerome Powell saying we shouldn't even be talking about this how concerned are State leaders um what have you gathered there as far as what the impacts could be here at home yeah I think they're just starting to realize this because you know and again thinking that an impasse and a default you know it would be dramatic for the state because the the budget forecast already looks far into the future under difficult circumstances as we think about the potential for recession or more economic slowdown inflation there's things going on in the banking industry right now so that's all going to make things difficult in a normal setting you throw in the the Wild Card of a possible default and all the Havoc that would reek on the federal government it'll Cascade down to the state level and so there might be a little bit of of wait and see but it's it's getting late in the game a lot earlier because of this and so it's really a big factor there's a big hearing next week in Trenton on the budget and I think we'll we'll start to maybe hear some questions about debt ceiling come up then but I mean the state has been given in recent years and of course because of different Federal pots of money that have been made available quite a bit of funding from the government is there any talk about potentially clawbacks with some of the money that hasn't yet been allocated yes and that was one of the really big things if you were listening closely to the leaders when they came out yesterday was this idea that maybe an area of compromise Republicans would like to claw back some of the federal government's pandemic and stimulus money that went out to localities and States so we don't know any real details but one area where there seems to be at least an opening for compromise would be if the president is willing to claw back some of this Aid well New Jersey is one of the states that has both not allocated all of its federal aid and then we saw a recent audit that showed that of the funding that's been allocated not all of it has been spent down in fact a good portion hasn't been and so that is something to keep a very close eye on and that's been a consistent criticism of the Murphy Administration from various parties all right John reitmeyer thank you so much you're welcome [Music] [Music]