What was (and wasn’t) accomplished in D.C. this past year
What was (and wasn’t) accomplished in D.C. this past year
It’s been one heck of an economic year: the “will we?” or “won’t we?” of a recession, the impacts of rapidly-evolving artificial intelligence, a banking crisis at the start of the year and all that continued labor organizing, just to name a few highlights. (Oh, and the Taylor Swift hype, of course.)
We here at Marketplace have recently been outlining predictions for 2024 — including for the housing market, the car market, workplace trends, labor unions and streaming services.
But over in Washington, D.C., some of the biggest news may have been what didn’t happened. Marketplace’s Senior Washington Correspondent Kimberly Adams joined “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio to talk about the economic news that came out of the nation’s capital this year and what we can look forward to (or dread) in the year ahead. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
David Brancaccio: As we both think back across 2023, I guess it’s fair to say the air in D.C. was not choked by all the new legislation passed, signed and put into law.
Kimberly Adams: No, but it certainly was choked up by the drama. It felt like we were lurching from one crisis to the next, whether it be the House Speaker fight, or the debt ceiling, whether or not we could pass a spending bill, or were we going to have a government shutdown? And to be honest, it’s not looking much better for next year. A lot of these issues are still kind of unresolved.
Brancaccio: All right, but the executive branch on its own does have the power to put into force, really some major legislation from years gone by.
Adams: Right, so we are starting to see the rollout and implementation of some of the big pieces of legislation that were passed earlier on in the Biden administration. Money is starting to flow from the CHIPS Act, which is supposed to build up our domestic infrastructure for semiconductor manufacturing. Projects are underway in some parts of the country with money from the infrastructure law that actually got done a couple years ago. And while we still haven’t seen much of that robust EV-charging infrastructure promised from the Inflation Reduction Act, a lot of those efforts are underway and that stuff is coming.
Brancaccio: My kingdom for an EV charger, you hear that? I think we have work to do covering our business reporter slices of an election.
Adams: So many slices of that. Yeah, that’s what I’m going to be focused on for much of 2024. You know, of course, campaigning and fundraising has already been going on for months. This election is set to be the most expensive ever, which it feels like we say that every cycle. And the economy is always a top issue in both local, state and national races. Campaigns, though, have so much data about us now from how we browse on the internet to where we go and what we watch on TV. And with all of these new artificial intelligence tools and other kinds of technology layered on top of fragmented audiences across different platforms, I think this election, we’re going to see all of that money going into hyper-targeted messages about what is and isn’t happening in the economy as campaigns try to sway voters ahead of November.
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