The false economic narratives continue

Make Me Smart June 17, 2024 Transcript

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Kai Ryssdal 

All right, Charlton, let’s hit that button. Shall we? My goodness.

Kimberly Adams 

Hello everyone, I’m Kimberly Adams. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today makes sense.

Kai Ryssdal 

I’m Kai Ryssdal. Thanks for joining us on this Monday. It is the 17th of June, 2024

Kimberly Adams 

And it is quite the Monday. Today we are going to do some news. Get to some smiles. Let’s start with the news. What caught your interest over the weekend, Kai?

Kai Ryssdal 

So, there is a new segment coming to Marketplace, which would be titled the bonkers economic things that the Trump campaign is saying full stop. I cannot handle it anymore. I think I talked the other day about the former president’s proposal to replace the income tax with tariffs, and I pointed out how the math doesn’t work. Here is one. This is Jay Nordlinger. He’s Republican. First of all, he’s at National Review, a Republican publication. So, he’s a conservative dude, and he is quoting a spokesman for the Republican National Committee as saying this. Quote: “The notion that tariffs are attacks on U.S. consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party.” End quote. As I said the other day, I don’t know what to do with this, because it’s just, it’s so, on the face of it, absurd and offered in such bad faith and a economic, that is to say, without any economic basis. I just don’t get it. I don’t. Okay, that’s it.

Kimberly Adams 

What I loved about that tweet that you shared, or whatever we’re calling them now, is that someone then links to in the responses to the Heritage Foundation, as in the Project 2025 originators, in which the headline says, “Heritage president: ‘Tariffs are a tax increase on American workers and their families.’”

Kai Ryssdal 

You know, it would be funny if it wasn’t so serious, right? Because there are millions, millions of people who will see that, and who have heard the former president talk about how the Chinese are paying the tariffs, which, parenthetically, they are not. They will see it, and they will believe it, and it just damages things.

Kimberly Adams 

It does. I’ve been doing some reporting on Social Security the last week or so and having interviews with economists and policy makers across the political spectrum. And one of the things that anybody who thinks seriously about Social Security says is that the narrative around it is so disingenuous across the board. And we’ve said here on the pod, you know, like, oh, just, you know, raise the cap and we’ll all be fine. And I was talking to people, they’re like, no, no, that’s not going to do it. It’s raise the cap on income tax. It’s also increased the retirement age. It is also increased taxes. It has to be all of them, or the numbers will not work, and nobody wants to say this out loud, and there is zero political incentive for policymakers to take action now when they can let somebody else deal with it when it’s a full-blown crisis. And so, tariffs are one area where you’re going to hear all these narratives that are just not true. Social Security is another one. You’re going to hear a lot of narratives on the campaign trail that are just not true. We just encourage people to make sure you’re lining up your authoritative sources now and just checking some of what you hear from anybody on the campaign trail because it’s getting wild out here.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, it is. It’s getting wild. All right, what do you got?

Kimberly Adams 

I saw a really interesting opinion piece in The New York Times that is just, yet another buyer beware and a reminder of how hard it is to just exist within the healthcare system in America. And it’s a guest essay in the New York Times from a doctor. The doctor’s name is Danielle Ofri, a primary care doctor in New York, and the headline says: “Even Doctors Like Me Are Falling Into This Medical Bill Trap,” and they talk about taking their daughter to, you know, who had a bike injury that wasn’t really healing well and taking them to an urgent care clinic to get, you know, an x-ray. It was only a sprain, no big deal. And the doctor was feeling pretty good for like, not wasting the money and the resources going to an emergency room. Was glad to have this, like, lower cost option available at urgent care. But apparently, as they found out later, when they got the bill, because the urgent care clinic was hospital affiliated, they were charged hospital prices for the urgent care visit. And the whole point of urgent care is that, you know, hopefully it’s a little bit lower cost because you don’t need as intense help. But basically, there’s this loophole that hospitals have been exploiting by buying up urgent care clinics and doctor’s offices and practices and if it’s under the hospital umbrella, you can get charged the hospital prices, right? Annoying and frustrating can be really financially damaging for someone if you think you’re taking a lower cost option, and you end up, you know, getting a surprise. The reason I bring this up is not just to say bad healthcare system, but because, as it mentions in this article, several states. Yes, there’s federal legislation that would address this, that would probably, is probably going nowhere, but several states are also working to end this practice, or to change it, or to make the pricing more transparent. And we’ve mentioned a couple times on here that state and local elections are often even more important than the federal elections, and this is yet another example of paying attention to what’s going on at your state regulators. Pay attention to who’s making the decisions about how hospitals are setting their prices, who’s on the committee in your state legislature that gets to make the decision about whether or not hospitals and urgent care centers and health insurance providers can do what they do in your state. Because as hopeless as we can feel with what’s going on at the federal level, at the state level, there is still a lot of space for people to make change and to actually meaningfully influence politics because most of the time, nobody’s watching, especially with so many fewer local and state level journalists, it’s kind of on individual people to keep an eye on what their state government is doing, and you can actually change it. So that’s my PSA, if you’re paying attention to your state and local government, so that if your daughter gets a sprain, you’re not overcharged for an x-ray to the tune of thousands of dollars.

Kai Ryssdal 

All right. Charlton. What do you got, Kimberly Adams?

Kimberly Adams 

A little bit sad, but also kind of uplifting. I know we talk a lot about, you know, technology being harmful in many ways and potentially, you know, when Skynet wakes up, but I saw this story that one of our Make Me Smart discord listeners flagged for us and for the whole discord crew. In the headline says: “Watch a robot race over Lake Michigan waves to help a swimmer.” There is a remote-controlled robot called EMILY that has apparently existed for a long time. Apparently, they use it a lot on the beaches in Los Angeles. You all have a bunch of them out there, but it’s like a robot boat with handles on it, and lifeguards can send it out to somebody in distress in the water very quickly, can go up to like 24 miles an hour, so that people have something to hang on to until help gets to them. And I don’t know if you’ve ever been caught in a rip current before, have you?

Kai Ryssdal 

I never have, actually, no.

Kimberly Adams 

I have. It’s terrifying. It’s so scary. And, you know, I’m a decent swimmer, but I was with people who were not very strong swimmers, and all of us trying to get back to shore at the same time was one of the most frightening experiences of my life. And so, the reason that I’m talking about this story today, and the reason they wrote about it was because these set of two parents lost their kids, “Kory Ernster and Emily MacDonald, a young couple that died in August 2022 while swimming in Lake Michigan at South Haven,” and their families purchased two of these rescue devices and donated them so that people at that beach can have these tools available. And so, I just thought that was really nice to take a tragedy, and have the families use it to do something that can help others. And it’s a story of tech for good. I was not able to find much research on like, how many rescues have actually been achieved by these but maybe somebody out there who’s more plugged into this than I am can find out. But I just thought it was so cool. There’s a video of how these things work and having been in distress in the water before, I think this is something that’s really cool.

Kai Ryssdal 

Not fun. It’s no fun. That’s very cool. It is very cool. All right, mine is an item on this podcast today, just because my mother used to beat me up about this when I was a kid. So, Catherine Middleton, the Princess of Wales, made her first appearance in many, many months after announcing she had cancer. She’s in chemo, and she went out for the King’s birthday parade and celebration, and she said in a statement, talking about all the public support she’s gotten from the king’s subjects, as it were. She came out and said, “All this support,” and this is a quote, “really has made the world of difference to William and me.” Okay, William and me. YouGov, which is a polling organization over in the UK, went out and asked a poll of the English-speaking peoples, as it were. They asked whether people think it really has made the world of difference to William and me is correct, or it really has made the world of difference to William and I was correct. And the answer, of course, is that William and me is correct in that formulation, because you take out the William.

Kimberly Adams

Speaking in direct object.

Kai Ryssdal

Exactly, yeah. You know the technical answer. I just know kind of what sounds good anyway. So.

Kimberly Adams 

Thank you, better reader, my eighth-grade grammar teacher, it’s a direct object, as opposed.

Kai Ryssdal 

You can probably diagram sentences too. Can’t you?

Kimberly Adams 

I can diagram sentences. Yes, I can.

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, I hated those. I hated those. Anyway. So.

Kimberly Adams 

I actually loved it.

Kai Ryssdal

Did you?

Kimberly Adams

I liked diagraming sentences.

Kai Ryssdal

It doesn’t surprise me.

Kimberly Adams

I think it does too. I think it does. I like it when things make sense.

Kai Ryssdal 

Exactly, exactly. So, they asked whether William and me was correct or William and I was correct. And remember, these are the people who came up with the English language. 22% of people in the UK said William and me is correct. 56% got the wrong answer and said William and I is correct. And my mother truly, this was my mother’s pet peeve. God bless her, but this was the thing that got her when I was growing up. Anyway.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah, let me make sure I actually have that right before I embarrass this reader. I think it’s a direct object. No, it’s the subject of a prepositional phrase. That’s what it is.

Kai Ryssdal 

We have to leave this in too.

Kimberly Adams 

Of course you can. That’s fine. That’s fine. It’s been a while since I was in eighth grade, and someone else will probably be better at that than me. But yes, I can.

Kai Ryssdal 

We will hear about this from listeners. I promise.

Kimberly Adams 

Let’s do it. But I do want to say something about this me versus I thing because this came up a lot in college and afterwards. I often found that people who were first generation college students and people who came from communities where they really spoke like local dialects or even just way more casual language, they would come to college, go to college, and learn sort of these rules of proper grammar. And one of the first things that you learn is that you know, it’s a subject, it’s you and you know. Is it you know he and I, or you and I, or you and me and all these things, and the me versus I construction seems to be the one that people would overcorrect for because when you’re on the fence and you don’t want to sound dumb in front of more educated people, you go with the I. And I think that has really, it’s sort of like one of these tells of people who you know, are trying their best to adapt to, you know, different rules of language than they grew up with. As I end a sentence with a preposition. And so, I think that’s one of the reasons that it happens a lot, because I know I was coached so much to make sure use I, used I in the proper context, over and over again, that I started to doubt myself, even to this day, I’m like, is it I? Is it me? I don’t know. And I pay attention to this stuff a lot.

Kai Ryssdal 

There you go. Yeah, that and a grammar lesson today. Here we go.

Kimberly Adams 

Probably a wrong one, but whatevs. We do our best. Any who. That’s it for us today. You can join us tomorrow for our weekly deep dive. Maybe we should do a deep dive on grammar. This week, we’re digging in. You’re like, no, absolutely not. But this week, we are digging into how people’s personal economies are affected when they choose to put friendship at the center of their lives, as opposed to marriage or romantic relationships. We’re going to get into the benefits, the challenges of how people navigate this, navigate it when life is structured a little bit differently, especially in a culture where a spouse is treated as the default option. It’s going to be super interesting.

Kai Ryssdal 

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

Kimberly Adams 

Marissa Cabrera is our senior producer. Bridget Bodnar is the director of podcasts. And Francesca Levy is the executive director of Digital.