Turbulent times at Boeing

Make Me Smart June 20, 2024 Transcript

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Kai Ryssdal 

Hey everybody, I’m Kai Ryssdal. Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where we make today makes sense.

Kimberly Adams 

And I’m Kimberly Adams. Thank you everyone for joining us. It is Thursday, June the 20th.

Kai Ryssdal 

This being a Thursday, we’re going to listen back some of the big stories of the week, play some audio and discuss briefly. First one is from a congressional hearing this past Tuesday on oh look, Boeing’s safety problems.

Josh Hawley

“Is quality part of your compensation package?”

Dave Calhoun

“Senator, I meet with the FAA pretty regularly. They don’t hold anything back, and I’m not aware of anything that has been cited with respect to those accidents that we haven’t taken action on.”

Josh Hawley

“Really? Because we’ve had whistle blowers. You said you’d listen to whistleblower testimony. We’ve had multiple whistleblowers come before this committee and allege that Boeing is cutting every possible corner on quality and safety. Not just in the past, but now.”

Kai Ryssdal 

Who’s doing this? You or me?

Kimberly Adams 

That’s you. All you. Aviation guy.

Kai Ryssdal 

That’s me. All right. So, aviation, yes. So, that was Josh Hawley, the senator from Missouri, and the embattled CEO of Boeing. His name is Dave Calhoun and senators actually from both sides of the aisle. This is a bipartisan corporate drubbing that happened here, obviously about the company safety culture and its retaliation against whistleblowers, which has been accused. This is also the week that another whistleblower came forward alleging that Boeing had known that a bunch of parts were faulty and yet lost track of them, and they may have wound up in aircraft, which is not great. Calhoun has said, this was probably a couple of months ago, that he’s going to step down by the end of the year. But as the Wall Street Journal reports, and also, common sense dictates, who wants that job? Man, holy cow, that’s going to be a toughie and also, just because, you know, Boeing does more than just airplanes, as Kelly pointed out in a Slack to me this morning, its spaceship is going to get stuck on the International Space Station because it’s having those helium leaks and thruster challenges that we talked about before it launched. So, all is not good at a very venerable American company.

Kimberly Adams 

You know who they’re going to give that job to? A woman of color.

Kai Ryssdal 

Oh, yeah. Right, right, right. Exactly, yes. Totally, totally. And then she’ll last 18 months and she’ll fail, and everybody go oh, well, there you go. Right? Totally.

Kimberly Adams 

Exactly, exactly. That’s what will happen. Anyway. Your cynicism is rubbing off on me. Let’s move on. Next one is about immigration policy. Let’s hear it.

President Joe Biden

“These couples have been raising families, sending their kids to church and school, paying taxes, contributing to our country for every, for 10 years or more. Matter of fact, the average time they’ve spent here is 23 years, people we’re affecting today, but living in the United States all this time with fear and uncertainty, we can fix that, and that’s what I’m going to do today.”

Kimberly Adams 

That was President Biden. As you probably know, on Tuesday, speaking at a White House event to mark the 12th anniversary of DACA, that’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. He was announcing a new program that’s going to offer legal status and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens. Now, under the current rules, not everyone married to a U.S. citizen is eligible for legal status, especially if they entered the country illegally. The change would potentially impact about 500,000 spouses of U.S. citizens, and it could allow those folks to apply for work permits. And it’s important to note that this does have a very strong economic angle because immigration is an economic story, as well as a humanitarian story. Immigration has been pretty much the major driver of labor market growth in the United States post pandemic, and a lot of the GDP growth that we’ve seen many economists have attributed to immigration, rather than just folks returning back to work. Although, of course, that’s part of it, but immigration is also a really big part of it as well. And since there are still quite a few job openings per person here in the United States, economists continue to say that we need immigration if we want the kind of growth that people are hoping for and the recovery that we’re kind of hoping for.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, it’s, I don’t know. I just get more and more annoyed when I think about the immigration challenge in this country because of the congressional failure. But I guess we’ve had that conversation.

Kimberly Adams 

Well, I also will layer on to your annoyance that it’s happening now in the run up to the election when this administration has been around for a while. If this was a policy that you really wanted and prioritized, it could have been done sooner. Immigration and, you know, there will be legal challenges. And so, now what’s going to happen is that the legal challenges are going to occur in an uncertain political environment moving forward, whereas if this had actually been a priority, the legal challenges could have been hashed out while, you know, there was one administration in place, if that was an actual priority.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah, exactly not an executive branch priority, right? It’s a political priority. Now that you know, it’s become a huge issue for Biden, that’s totally true. A thousand percent. All right, another one. So today, Supreme Court decision watch. We’ve got like, a zillion huge cases and like, single digit number of days left in the Supreme Court’s term, unless they like, stay overtime. Big one came out today about the tax code. It’s about foreign income and the 2017 Trump tax cuts. Here comes Eamon Javers from CNBC to explain what’s going on.

Eamon Javers

“If the Supreme Court were to undermine this particular element of tax law, there were some questions about how much that would cost the United States, and how many other elements of tax law under this precedent would then be subject to challenges of their own, and how much lost revenue at a time of soaring deficits for the United States that would that would result in.”

Kai Ryssdal 

Yeah. So, here’s a hint from the prep that Courtney pulled together for us. $340 billion by 2027 is the amount that could possibly have been at jeopardy. It’s a tax case that was all about one-time offshore earnings. And I don’t want to get into the whole realized or not realized thing, the nut graph of this is that thing that Eamon mentioned. This was a case that Paul Ryan mentioned. Paul Ryan, former Speaker House, tax policy nerd. Paul Ryan basically said, if the Supreme Court goes the wrong way on this one, the whole tax code falls apart. So, the Supreme Court, you know, upheld this tax as part of the Trump tax cuts, but I don’t think we’re done with it yet actually. It’s a super, super complicated case.

Kimberly Adams 

Some of the reporting I read about this today was saying that this case was really about an effort to preempt a federal wealth tax, with the idea that the federal government can tax income, but there can’t be a federal property tax. And if the people pushing for this could have gotten the Supreme Court to say that this was equivalent to a federal property tax, it would have put certain kinds of income under the property umbrella and then preempted that sort of wealth tax that may be coming down the pipeline if progressives get their wish in the future, and the Supreme Court did not get on board with that, which is pretty interesting, but, yes, very complicated, but definitely not the end of it.

Kai Ryssdal 

Yep, totally. All right, let’s keep going.

Kimberly Adams 

Yeah. So, last clip for today is about the second most popular sport in the world. Let’s hear it.

Sridhar Natarajan

“Let’s be real. It’s not like just because they’ve had this World Cup, you will have a sudden increase, massive increase, or surge in popularity with the sport. There will be a blip, but it will go down again. You need to water the seed. As one of the players told us, the bigger challenge is, how do you grow this over the next 2030 years?”

Kimberly Adams 

So, that was Bloomberg reporter Sridhar Natarajan on Bloomberg last Friday to talk about the United States growing interest in cricket. Now this may have popped into some of y’all feeds, but it is absolutely new for me. I just started seeing stories about it pop up because, in case you missed it, the USA men’s cricket team is having a historic run at what’s called the T20 World Cup. They beat Pakistan in a huge underdog in victory. Nobody really saw it coming, and they advanced to the second round of the turn tournament. Yesterday, the U.S. team lost to South Africa in the opening game of the tournament’s second round, but they’re not out of the Cricket World Cup yet. They have a couple more games in this round to see if they advance. And what’s wild is that this team is made up of part-time players with jobs ranging from tech workers to Uber drivers. The reporter we just heard from describes the team as a “motley crew.” I think they make what, like $10,000 for doing this. Not that much at all. They’ve got like $250 a day, you know, thing that they get. And really, they’re doing this because they love the game. Zooming out, Cricket is growing in the U.S., and many people are predicting that the U.S. team’s success this year will generate even more interest in the sport, and it’s getting a lot of traction, particularly in parts of the country where there’s large South Asian communities. But this is a huge deal. Apparently, some of the big CEOs in the tech community who come from South Asian backgrounds are bankrolling and trying to increase interest in the sport, and I think it’s great. And I spent a bit of time today trying to understand the rules of cricket and failed miserably. I will be on the learning curve with everybody else here, but good luck Team USA.

Kai Ryssdal 

First feature story I ever did for National Public Radio. When I was at KQED, I was a brand spanking new intern was a story on the Cricket World Cup, and I went to this Indian theater in Fremont, California. This was 25ish years ago, right? It was airing live, which meant it aired in the middle. Yeah, right. So, it was airing. The Cricket World Cup was airing live, and it was India somebody. I forget who it was, but of course, that minute was like two o’clock in the morning in California. It was great. It was cool. I went and hung out with a whole rowdy crowd of Indian cricket fans. It was fun. It was fun.

Kimberly Adams 

You should go back to the same place and watch the team USA play Cricket World Cup.

Kai Ryssdal

I bet you it’s packed.

Kimberly Adams

That would be amazing. I’ll bet it is too.

Kai Ryssdal 

All right, that is it for us today. Back tomorrow, Economics on Tap. Drinks, news and a game. YouTube live stream at 3:30 Pacific, 6:30 Eastern. Do not miss it.

Kimberly Adams 

Make Me Smart is produced by Courtney Bergsieker. Audio engineering by Jayk Cherry. Ellen Rolfes writes our newsletter. And Thalia Menchaca is our intern.

Kai Ryssdal 

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