Chaos is not an economic strategy
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 6 February 2025
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
Elon Musk and the rest of the DOGE gang have been inside the guts of the federal government attempting to shut down agencies and gain access to the Treasury Department’s main payment system. We’ll discuss the constitutionality of it all and why some members of Congress may be reluctant to say it like it is. Plus, the toy business is paying attention to prices as Trump threatens trade war. And, AI is making a splash at the 2025 Super Bowl.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- Watch: “Rep. Khanna: If Elon Musk finds fraud or wasteful spending, come to Congress and force a vote on it” by CNBC Television
- “Musk DOGE agents access sensitive personnel data, alarming officials” by The Washington Post
- “U.S. nonprofits still reeling from federal funding freeze” from Marketplace
- 2024 Q4 Earnings Call from Alphabet Investor Relations
- “Fast fashion, laptops and toys are likely to cost more due to US tariffs on Chinese imports” from AP News
- Watch: Act Like You Know :60 | GoDaddy Super Bowl Commercial 2025 on YouTube
- “Super Bowl to feature AI product ads from Big Tech” from Marketplace
Join us tomorrow for “Economics on Tap.” The YouTube livestream starts at 3:30 p.m. Pacific time, 6:30 p.m. Eastern.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey everybody, I'm Kyle Risdon. |
| 0:07.0 | Welcome back to Make Me Smart. Where we make today makes sense. |
| 0:11.5 | I'm Kimberly Adams. Thank you for joining us on this Thursday, February the 6th. |
| 0:15.8 | We are going to do our usual Thursday thing today, listening to some audio from the week's news and discuss. |
| 0:22.1 | We begin with a clip from CNBC. It's California Democratic Congressman Roe Kana, talking about |
| 0:28.4 | what else, what Elon Musk and his gang have been up to inside the guts of the federal government. |
| 0:35.0 | The problem I have is come to Congress, show where the fraud is, show where the wasteful |
| 0:40.0 | spending is, and force an up or down vote. |
| 0:42.7 | Don't make that decision unilaterally. |
| 0:45.9 | That just, in my view, violates the Constitution. |
| 0:48.8 | Oh, my God. |
| 0:49.5 | All right. |
| 0:49.8 | So peek behind the curtain here. |
| 0:51.9 | We don't often, let me rephrase that. |
| 0:54.0 | So what Courtney puts in the rundown is the beginning and the end. So, peek behind the curtain here. We don't often, let me rephrase that. |
| 0:58.9 | So what Courtney puts in the rundown is the beginning and the end of the cut. |
| 1:05.0 | So all I saw was the problem I have in Q and then OutQ is violates the Constitution. |
| 1:12.7 | The fact that Kana says, in my view, none of this is complicated, right? |
| 1:16.5 | Talked about this yesterday with Blake Emerson on the radio program, right? |
| 1:24.7 | What's happening here is an extra constitutional structure for Elon Musk to run the apparatus of the federal government. |
| 1:27.7 | And I'm sorry, this is just this is not the point of it at all, |
| 1:34.5 | but it's, but it's waffling and and wavering and not saying things as they are. It's using innuendo and dodging, actually taking responsible for saying, this is unconstitutional. Congressman, |
... |
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