Don‘t kid ourselves. The federal government is hurtling toward disaster with its destructive activities underwritten by the Federal Reserve System. It‘s best that we know how to protect ourselves from the consequences.
Twentieth and twenty-first century monetary history shows us how our government, step-by-step, removed the monetary gold standard and introduced their fiat paper currency dollar to fund their increasing political power.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act is now law. It's expected to cost the government a pretty penny. The Congressional Budget Office predicts a $3.4 trillion increase in the deficit over ten years. This is driven by significant tax cuts, including extensions of those made in 2017.
Trump's advisors argue the tax cuts will pay for themselves. Today on the show, we speak with the guru on that school of thought, Arthur Laffer, and dig into some of those claims with a tax economist.
Related episodes: The simple math of the big bill (Apple / Spotify) What's going to happen to the Trump tax cuts? (Apple / Spotify) So, how's this No Tax On Tips thing gonna go? (Apple / Spotify)
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A central belief of collectivists is that people think collectively, too. Whether one is a member of a class, religious group, or ethnic group, collectivism holds that each group has distinct interests that determine how individuals in the group think. Mises would have disagreed.
Although President Trump has claimed that tariffs will ultimately raise our standard of living, they really are taxes on consumers. Furthermore, tariffs also deny consumers the choices they want to make.
Monetarists have long believed that the Fed should pursue policies of low inflation in order to counter the effects of lower prices through enhanced productivity. Thus, they reason, overall prices will remain stable. Such policies actually promote economic instability.
In the U.S., we insure most everything we sell. So why not trees? Today on the show why trees aren't insured like other crops, and what it would take to get that insurance with extreme weather events on the rise.
Related episodes: When insurers can't get insurance (Apple / Spotify)
For sponsor-free episodes of The Indicator from Planet Money, subscribe to Planet Money+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.
Mixed martial arts is a brutal, imperfect, occasionally ugly sport. But it’s also one of the most honest epistemic systems we have when dealing with self-defense, and each individual has the right to defend himself against aggressors.