Last week, two federal indictments and several high-profile arrests rocked the NBA. One indictment accused defendants of sharing insider information to cheat at sports betting, and the other accused over 30 co-conspirators, including members of various mafia families, of rigging poker games.
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All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.
- Caribbean Roundtable
- The Campaign to Bust Chicago’s Only Bookstore Union
- What’s Real in the Politics of Population with Andrew
- Occulture, William S. Burroughs, and Generative AI
- Executive Disorder: White House Weekly #39
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A federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the Trump administration to tap emergency money set aside for food stamps, saying “irreparable harm” could occur
This week’s SNAP crisis is just a preview. Tucked inside the giant tax-cut and spending bill signed by President Donald Trump this summer are enormous cuts to SNAP: Who qualifies, how much they get, and who foots the bill for the program. That last part is a huge change.
For the entire history of the food stamp program, the federal government has paid for all the benefits that go out. States pay part of the cost of administering it, but the food stamp money has come entirely from federal taxpayers. This bill shifts part of the costs to states.
How much will states have to pay? It depends. The law ties the amount to a statistic called the Payment Error Rate -- the official measure of accuracy -- whether states are giving recipients either too much, or too little, in food stamp money.
On today’s show, we go to Oregon to meet the bureaucrats on the front lines of getting that error rate down -- and ask Governor Tina Kotek what’s going to happen if they can’t.
This episode was hosted by Nick Fountain and Jeff Guo. It was produced by James Sneed and Willa Rubin, edited by Marianne McCune and Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Debbie Daughtry and Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money’s executive producer.
