Make Me Smart January 24, 2024 Transcript

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Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, yeah. Oh well, I guess. I guess we’ll start just like what? Hey everybody, I’m Kai Ryssdal. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where ready or not we make today make sense.

Kimberly Adams 

And I’m Kimberly Adams. Thank you for joining us on this Wednesday. It’s January 24. I can’t believe we’re almost to the end of the month already.

Kai Ryssdal 

I know. It’s crazy. Those of you participating in Dry January, seven more days. Okay so, news and then some smiles. And then we’ll be on our merry way. What do you got, Ms. Adams?

Kimberly Adams 

Yours looks more interesting. Why do you go first?

Kai Ryssdal 

So, mine is a twofer. One is an article out of Bloomberg. An interview with Robert Rubin, who was Treasury Secretary during the Clinton administration, also a longtime creature of Wall Street, in which and this is the headline, “Rubin warns of enormous risks from America’s fiscal trajectory,” which fine he did that. The really interesting part is that he says out loud in this piece that “Congress is going to have to consider tax increases, to get us to where we need to be,” that is to say that we can’t really cut all that much more because Americans want and demand things. And if you’re going to cut, that’s going to get dicey politically in a big bad hurry. So that was really interesting. And I commend the article to your attention. Why I bring it up is that juxtaposed to that in an email newsletter that I get called Politico’s Morning Money, and Politico guys are really plugged in Washington. Morning Money is well grounded in the happenings of finance and the SEC and Congress and all those things. There’s a piece in Morning Money today that reads like this, “For years Congress has blinked as the national debt balloons. Now, a long-shot effort to carve a common path forward could be gaining momentum.” Great. So far, so good. That was me now continuing. “House Budget Chair Jodey Arrington says he wants the House to pass a bill from these two other representatives that would create a fiscal commission to study spending as part of looming appropriations legislation. Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, sponsoring similar legislation alongside Mitt Romney, said on Tuesday, he ‘will fight like the dickens’” to keep that condition. And so Congress, as Congress is want to do is looking only at spending cuts. And from the outside world, and this includes me, people are wondering, how are we now talking about the revenue side of the equation? And I know I’ve said this on the podcast before, but the idea that we can’t even talk about raising taxes to pay for all of the things that Americans want, need and demand and deserve in some degree is insane. It’s absolutely nutty. That’s it. End of rant.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, I think it’s that so many people feel like any government waste where it occurs, because it does sometimes or any, that is coming directly from their pocket, right? Like the other day, we did the story on, you know, how much a government shutdown, even an almost government shutdown costs.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, that was you, not we. You did that story, I’m sure.

Kimberly Adams 

You did the introduction. It’s a partnership. But you know, and when I was reporting it, I couldn’t find really good numbers on it, because they probably don’t like to look at it for good reason. But back in the 2019 shutdown, it was like $338 million for just associated costs of the shutdown, not even talking about back pay or whatever. But just winding things up and winding things down, so every single time we do this, it costs money. And these stories are often effective, because when people hear that taxpayer dollars are going to X. Waste, fraud, abuse, whatever you feel that personally, like I’m paying taxes, and it gets this. And so, the counter to that, I think, is that when you talk about raising taxes, if you end up bearing the brunt of that, all of those little things loom much larger. Even if you still get your roads and your bridges and, you know, space exploration and all the other, you know, things you start to pay a lot more attention to all the other ways that the system isn’t working well. And I think that’s what makes it hard.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, I think that’s fair. It’s just, we can’t even talk about it. And that’s just, it’s crazy. Anyway, what do you got?

Kimberly Adams 

I love OpenSecrets. They’re such a good organization. And you know, shoutout to Sheila Krumholz, who was on here, has been on here before. But also, she’s retiring from running Open Secrets. You should remind people what it is. Yes, sorry. OpenSecrets is an organization that tracks money in politics and does it very, very well and often will issue very detailed reports looking at how money is flowing through politics, not just at in terms of political candidates and what they file with the FEC, but they’re looking at Super PACs and political action committees and lobbying groups, and they just put out a report on foreign funding in elections. Now, foreign entities are not supposed to be contributing money to our state, federal elections, right. And this is illegal, right? So let me just read a little bit here, “Federal campaign finance law bars contributions made directly or indirectly, from foreign nationals in connection with any federal, state or local election, but U.S.-registered corporations that are subsidiaries of foreign corporations or that have foreign ownership often pour money into U.S. politics. A new OpenSecrets analysis found these foreign influence companies have poured millions of dollars into political contributions to lawmakers in states that are cracking down on their political giving.” So, OpenSecrets was only able to track this in the states that are really starting to look at it. But after Citizens United in 2010, it allowed, you know, corporations or people, so corporations could start contributing to candidates and campaigns and PACs and all those things. Right? So, if it’s a corporation that is in the United States, that corporation and its associated industry groups or PACs can contribute to candidates. But if you’re a company that has a huge stake of foreign ownership, or your company and many of your employees that are contributing to the company, you know, political action committee has a lot of people who are foreigners, that is seemingly allowing people to get around this rule. And so, they’re looking at companies like Altria Group, which, you know, has some foreign ownership, BP, Coca-Cola, Phillips 66, PepsiCo, Madison Square Garden Entertainment, there’s a whole bunch. And so, according to Open Secrets “database of contributions made by foreign-influenced companies in Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, New York and Washington — they attracted more than $163 million in political contributions between the 2018 and 2022 election cycles from companies that could be impacted by new laws. Committees include state-level candidates, party committees, PACs and ballot measure committees as well as independent expenditure committees were available.” So, foreign money in politics, despite it being illegal.

Kai Ryssdal 

You know, this goes to the thing we were talking about the other day, and the absolute canard that, you know, campaign finance regulations are, and the idea that that we have any control at all over who is buying financing and otherwise spending money in our elections.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, not much without the enforcement side of things. And right now, the enforcement side is lacking.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yep, yep. Anyway. Yes. Go ahead.

Kimberly Adams 

I was really struggling to find a Make Me Smile today. So, I just picked this one. It is a good one. And it did make me smile. But it also made me a little like, okay. Jon Stewart is returning to ‘The Daily Show’. He’s going to be hosting the show on Monday and be the executive producer. He, you know, it makes sense that he would go back to ‘The Daily Show’ when they’ve been looking for a new host, and his own show on Apple TV has, I think, been ended as well. And so yeah, the problem with Jon Stewart, it didn’t really gain a lot of traction. So, wonderful to see Jon Stewart returning to the host chair. He does such a great job. And really, I think created a generation of news consumers from people who were kind of not engaged. When I was in college, and I was studying journalism, the vast majority of my friends were getting their news from ‘The Daily Show’ with Jon Stewart, not from me, or my peers in the industry. And so, I’m glad to see him back in the mix. But I also know that it speaks to the moment, and he has been a very vocal person when it comes to some of the problems and threats to the democracy. And I have to imagine that the dangerous moment that we’re in right now factored into his decision to go back to a job that you know, he’d been ready seemingly to move on from.

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, he definitely was. So is that your is that your misgiving about it. Yeah. All right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s fair. No, look, I think it’s, I think it’s fair. It’s totally fair. Okay, mine is not so much a Make Me Smile as a crazy, crazy story in Ars Technica about space and the space shuttle. And the headline of the piece is, “What happens when an astronaut in orbit says he’s not coming back?” And it goes into this guy in 1985, a scientist on STS-51-B, which is a space shuttle flight designation, goes up, having some problems with his experiment, can’t get it to work, can’t get it to work, asked for more time. Controllers on the ground won’t give them more time because astronauts are programmed to the nth degree because they only have so much time up there, right? And finally, he says, “if you won’t let me do my experiment, I’m not coming back.” And everybody goes, wait, what? Because all you do is open the hatch, and you’re not coming back, right? So anyway, we’ll put it on the thing. We’ll put on the show page, I mean, but this is a story about human dynamics. It’s a story about spaceflight. It’s a story about risk. It’s a story about crew coordination. It’s a story about science. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. And also, it’s ever more relevant as now more and more people, including like regular civilians who are not even really psychologically screened can go up in space to wild story.

Kimberly Adams 

It was. Man, I read that, and I was just like. I never. I never thought about it, despite this coming up in so many elements of science fiction. Oh, yeah. I didn’t think of it in real life.

Kai Ryssdal 

Anyway, it’s a good story. Check it out. It is a good story. And with that, we’re done. Back tomorrow which will be Thursday. Until then, you know how to get a hold of us. Thoughts, questions, comments, makemesmart@marketplace.org or voicemail comes to us at 508-U-B-Smart.

Kimberly Adams 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. Today’s program was engineered by Jayk Cherry, and Thalia Menchaca is our intern.

Kai Ryssdal 

Ben Tolliday and Daniel Ramirez composed our theme music. Our senior producer is Marissa Cabrera. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. Francesca Levy is the Executive Director of Digital and On-Demand whence this program comes.