The Excerpt podcast: Israel expands ground offensive in Gaza, impeachment probe update

On today's episode of The Excerpt podcast: Israel is again widening its offensive in Gaza. USA TODAY National Correspondent Trevor Hughes talks about preppers. The House GOP prepares to formally authorize an impeachment probe into President Joe Biden. USA TODAY Personal Finance Reporter Daniel de Visé recounts stories of how Americans are coping amid heavy credit card debt. The College Football Playoff teams have been decided.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Monday, December 4th, 2023. This is The Excerpt. Today, Israel again expands its offensive in Gaza, plus how preppers are preparing for possible societal collapse, and we hear stories of credit card debt and how folks got out of it.

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The Israeli military yesterday again called for mass evacuations from the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis as it widens a ground offensive and hits targets across the territory with air strikes. Israel has said its offensive is aimed at eliminating Gaza's Hamas leaders. But 15,500 people have been killed in Gaza during the war, according to the territory's health ministry, who says 70% of the dead are women and children. Over three-quarters of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been displaced. More than 1,200 people have been killed in Israel, and an estimated 135 of the 240 or so hostages taken by Hamas last month remain captive.

Meanwhile, commercial ships came under attack yesterday in international waters off the Red Sea, and the USS Carney shot down three drones while responding to distress calls from the vessels after they were targeted by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. According to a Pentagon statement, the Houthi rebels, who have ambushed multiple ships in the region in recent days, claimed responsibility, saying the commercial ships were from Israel. Though an Israeli military spokesman said the ships don't have a connection to the country. The attacks combined with an increase in clashes between Israeli forces and Hezbollah near the Lebanon border could represent steps toward an expansion of the war in the region. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.

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There's a growing interest in preparing for societal collapse. And next year's election is playing a role for some preppers on both sides of the political aisle. I spoke with USA TODAY National Correspondent Trevor Hughes to learn more. Trevor, always good to have you on.

Trevor Hughes:

Hey there.

Taylor Wilson:

So let's just start here, Trevor, what exactly is a prepper?

Trevor Hughes:

That word is loaded with a lot of things. But at the end of the day, what we're talking about are people who are prepared, which is where the word comes from, to handle some sort of crisis. Now, that could be something as simple as a few days without electricity or running water, which we see all the time in hurricanes on the East Coast, for instance, but it goes all the way up to complete societal collapse with roving bands of marauders trying to steal your food. It is really a very, very broad term that encompasses a great deal of interesting things.

Taylor Wilson:

And Trevor, what are we seeing about Americans preparing for disaster ahead of the 2024 election, and what exactly do they say they're preparing for?

Trevor Hughes:

Just to be clear, we're talking about, in many cases, stuff that our grandparents 100 years ago or even 50 years ago, they might've done and taken for granted because it was just sort of how you lived. We didn't have access to Amazon Prime or Instacart, instant delivery of groceries and food. And so what you're seeing now is a growing number of people, especially young people, who are looking at our society and thinking, "Boy, things could go bad quickly here, and I'm not sure if I believe the federal government or even my state government is going to be competent enough to help me in a disaster." That has long been a rallying cry among the very hardcore prepping communities, very libertarian prepping communities, but you're seeing an increase in younger folks who are saying, "Boy, I don't know if the federal government really can be trusted to handle a lot of these kinds of things."

Taylor Wilson:

So, Trevor, I mean, you write this piece here a little bit less than a year before the 2024 election, how is that election fueling some of these anxieties?

Trevor Hughes:

Well, on the left, you have a lot of younger people, maybe more liberal people, who saw Donald Trump as president, and they felt that his administration didn't know how to handle major disasters. And it in fact was more interested in settling scores than actually helping people during a crisis. And then on the right, you have folks who saw protests like the Black Lives Matter movement who really felt that, "Boy, wow, the police can't control this. The National Guard can't control this. The only person I can trust is me and maybe a small circle of friends." There is a small number of folks who do worry about some sort of armed conflict or civil war in connection to this upcoming election.

Taylor Wilson:

Prepping can mean stockpiling food and say medical supplies. Some preppers do also accumulate weapons. Who are these preppers, and what's their goal?

Trevor Hughes:

Well, there is sort of a basic rule of thumb in prepping, which is don't tell anyone you're a prepper. And that's because there's a fear that you might become a target, right? If there's a collapse of society and everyone is starving to death and yet you are somehow healthy and whole, people might look at you and say, "Hey, what's he got in his house?"

And so there is a whole splinter of the prepping ideology that says you need to stockpile everything that you might need for a year or more and then be prepared to defend that. These are groups that have a lot of firearms, that have a lot of ammunition, and they tend to stress that they are defensive only. They're not going out looking for trouble. They just want to be prepared if trouble comes looking for them.

Taylor Wilson:

You also wrote about some with a more community-based approach to prepping. How do they say it can help others?

Trevor Hughes:

I've covered dozens of disasters in my life, hurricanes and tornadoes and floods and wildfires. And I will tell you, every single time, it is community that helps people recover. It is your neighbors, your friends, and then ultimately those nonprofits like the Red Cross or The Salvation Army, and then the federal government might show up. And so there are a lot of preppers, especially younger preppers, who are trying to take a very community-based approach and to say, "How can I help myself so that I can then be ready to help my neighbors?" Because if you are not demanding services, if you are personally full and healthy, you can go help other people.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Trevor Hughes is a national correspondent for USA TODAY. Thanks as always, Trevor.

Trevor Hughes:

You bet.

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Taylor Wilson:

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News this weekend that an impeachment inquiry vote against President Joe Biden is a necessary step. Those comments came Saturday on Fox & Friends Weekend, but 2024 presidential hopeful and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis warned yesterday on NBC's Meet the Press that while he thinks the probe is justifiable, House Republicans, quote, "Run the risk of doing an inquiry that doesn't necessarily lead anywhere while they've been ignoring a lot of the problems that our voters are talking about," unquote.

House Republicans opened the impeachment inquiry into Biden in September over allegations that Biden financially benefited from his family's overseas business dealings, but the inquiry still has not produced evidence directly implicating Biden in those foreign affairs. House Republican leaders met behind closed doors last week to discuss the inquiry. GOP members leaving the meeting said they expected to see a vote to formally authorize the probe in the coming weeks to strengthen its legitimacy and legal standing.

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Well, the holiday season has arrived, but credit card debt can dampen this time of year for many. I spoke with USA TODAY Personal Finance Reporter Daniel de Visé for more. Daniel, thanks for hopping back on The Excerpt.

Daniel de Visé:

Great to be here.

Taylor Wilson:

So let's just start with this, how serious is America's credit card burden right now?

Daniel de Visé:

Well, the nation's collective credit card balance is more than a trillion dollars now, which is a record. That's how much people owe. And in terms of interest rates, it's scary. The average interest rate is 21%, which is the largest figure the feds have recorded in three decades of tracking, and other sources say it's the highest that those rates have ever been. I remember credit cards having high rates a long time ago, but not this high. During the holidays, of course, it's a perilous time for people who have credit cards because we're all tempted to use them, right?

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah, absolutely. And you heard from several Americans who are battling credit card debt. Some of them have moved on from it. I want to hear some about their stories. Let's start with Angela in Detroit. What's her experience been like?

Daniel de Visé:

Angela Davis. She's 31. She's in Detroit. You go back a few years, she's a great, hardworking American woman. She went to get a master's degree at the University of Michigan to get a better job in the end, and she tried to take out student loans and keep her job while she studied, which was she was a sanitation supervisor working 12-hour shifts. And as you might imagine, that plus full-time study did not work so well. So after a couple of months, she had to quit. And once she didn't have the job anymore, she just didn't have the cashflow, and so she started charging stuff, charging $100 here, $100 there, groceries, gas, meals out with her fiancé, and her card balances crept up.

Now, Angela is smart on this stuff. She studies the work of Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman. She knows personal finance, so she knew she was in trouble, and she took the initiative to contact the card companies to negotiate lower interest rates. That's something you can do if you have a high balance. And so she did that, and she closed some of the accounts. She kept a couple open, like her Old Navy card and a credit card to use for rental cars. And then, in 2022, she took the debt that she still had to Money Management, which is a nonprofit credit counselor. Those counselors helped her basically to begin paying down the debt that she still had.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. You mentioned credit counseling. What about this Texas couple, Walker and Kayla Dunn? How did this type of counseling really save them, and what lessons could others take from their story?

Daniel de Visé:

Well, they were a couple with two good jobs, and they did something a lot of people smartly do, which is they bought a fixer-upper in Midland, Texas, $280,000 and set about remodeling it. So a lot of people used to do this, take out personal loans, you do the renovation, and then you figure you'll refinance at a higher sum of money, and then you fold in whatever debt you have into the refi. So then you have a larger mortgage, but you can handle it because it's still one big payment.

What happened to them was, Kayla, the wife lost her job on Thanksgiving week in 2019. And so suddenly, they had one salary, and they were struggling. They started taking on more and more debt. The renovation, of course, they always cost more than they're supposed to. And by 2020, they had to enter into forbearance, which was like a pause in your mortgages because they couldn't keep up with the payment. That meant they could no longer do this refi because when your mortgage is in forbearance, I didn't know this, but you can't do a refinance.

So they were stuck. They wound up selling the fixer-upper and going into debt counseling with the same nonprofit company. They were paying $2,300 a month in credit card payments. Can you imagine that? And this was with much lower negotiated interest rates, with the help of the credit counselors, that that was the amount they had to pay to sort of really smack down this debt. And they had, I think, $55,000 in credit card debt when they went into credit counseling.

Taylor Wilson:

Well, you can read more of this story with a link in today's show notes. Daniel de Visé covers personal finance for USA TODAY. Thank you for coming on and recounting these stories, Daniel. Appreciate it.

Daniel de Visé:

Anytime, and happy holidays.

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Taylor Wilson:

The College Football Playoff has been decided. The selection committee yesterday unveiled the four teams that'll compete for the National Championship. Michigan received the top seed after running through the Big Ten Conference unbeaten and will play number four, Alabama, who won the SEC Championship on Saturday. Two-seed Washington is also undefeated and will take on number three, Texas. The biggest controversy surrounded whether to include one-loss Alabama or undefeated Florida State with the final spot. Both semifinals will take place on New Year's Day, and the winners will face off in the championship game on January 8th. You could find the rest of the bowl matchups and more college football from USA TODAY Sports.

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And today is Wildlife Conservation Day, a time to think about how we can protect endangered species and biodiversity on our planet. Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio. And if you have any comments, you can find us at [email protected]. I'm Taylor Wilson back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA TODAY.