Within a month of the May 5, 2023 recording, Republicans and Democrats did ultimately reach a bipartisan agreement on the debt ceiling: the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 was introduced May 29, passed the House May 31, passed the Senate June 1, and was signed by President Biden on June 3, 2023, suspending the debt limit until January 2025. 【1†cite】 As a result, the antecedent of the normalized prediction ("if Republicans and Democrats fail to reach agreement on the U.S. debt ceiling") never occurred, so the conditional statement was never directly tested.

Empirically, the U.S. economy did not "go off a cliff" in that month. Analyses at the time judged the eventual deal’s macroeconomic drag to be small, with little expected impact on near‑term growth. 【0†cite】 The labor market in May 2023 remained strong, adding about 339,000 jobs with unemployment at 3.7%, and financial markets reacted positively once a deal was in view. 【2†cite】 Q2 2023 real GDP grew at an annualized rate of about 2.4%, exceeding expectations and indicating continued expansion rather than a sudden contraction. 【3†cite】

However, expert and official analyses made clear that if the debt ceiling had not been raised and the U.S. had actually defaulted, the economy likely would have suffered a severe negative shock: the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Brookings, Moody’s, and others warned of an "economic catastrophe," deep recession, and millions of job losses in a breach scenario. 【3†cite】【8†cite】 That consensus supports the plausibility of Sacks’s conditional claim that the economy could "go off a cliff" in the event of a genuine failure to agree.

Because the condition (no eventual agreement) never materialized, reality only shows that the worst‑case outcome didn’t happen, not whether his specific conditional forecast ("if no deal, then a cliff‑like shock is possible") was right or wrong. Thus the correct scoring is ambiguous rather than clearly right or wrong.