More money, more problems?
Make Me Smart
Marketplace
4.6 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 7 April 2022
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
- With a dozen states considering sending payments to taxpayers to ease the sting of inflation, one listener is wondering whether more checks could actually have the opposite effect. We’ll break down the arguments on this Whaddya Wanna Know Wednesday. Plus, President Joe Biden announced this week that the pause on student loan payments would be extended to the end of August, but how would forgiving student loans altogether impact the nation’s economy? We’ve also got answers to your questions about bitcoin and the red-hot housing market. Here’s everything that we talked about today:
- “Stimulus checks for inflation: Here are the states planning to send money to residents” from CBS News
- “Another stimulus check could help fight inflation but a fourth is unlikely, experts say” from The Hill
- “How wiping out all student loan debt would change the economy” from Fortune
- “The student loan system has ‘layers of disfunction’” from Marketplace
- “What Would Forgiving Student Debt Mean for the Federal Budget?” from The Urban Institute
- “What Is Proof of Work (PoW) in Crypto?” from the Motley Fool
- Marketplace’s series reporting on cryptocurrency mining and the environment
- “When Will Be a Good Time to Buy a House?” from The Atlantic
- National home price index since 1987, from S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller and the St. Louis Federal Reserve
Do you have a question for Whaddya Wanna Know Wednesday? Share it with us and it could be answered on the show! Send us a voice memo or email to makemesmart@marketplace.org, or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART (508-827-6278)!
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We're happy to have you joining us for what do you want to know Wednesday? |
| 0:19.0 | Our listeners have been sending in questions over the last week and we'll do our best to |
| 0:22.8 | answer a few of them today. |
| 0:25.0 | And if you have a question that you think we should answer on this segment, leave us a |
| 0:28.2 | voicemail at 508-827-6278 or you can send us an email. |
| 0:34.3 | It's Make Me Smart at Marketplace.org. |
| 0:37.4 | Mandy from Texas has our first question in an email. |
| 0:41.1 | It says, I saw a few articles lately about states considering sending out stimulus checks |
| 0:46.1 | or tax rebates to lessen the impact of inflation on their residents. |
| 0:51.1 | Doesn't this have the opposite effect of the interest rate increases to combat inflation? |
| 0:56.0 | So, why are states considering the stimulus? |
| 0:58.6 | Can you make me smart? |
| 1:00.2 | So, the short answer is yes that it could increase inflation in the long term because |
| 1:06.2 | you put more cash into the economy by giving people another stimulus check. |
| 1:10.0 | They can spend it on more goods, increasing demand, pushing up inflation. |
| 1:14.5 | Yes, sure. |
| 1:16.0 | However, politics, a lot of politicians are facing a ton of pressure to do something to give |
| 1:25.1 | people relief right now, especially around gas prices and food prices. |
| 1:29.8 | So about a dozen states, including Georgia, Maine, California, and a bunch of others, |
| 1:35.2 | are proposing sending stimulus checks to their residents to kind of like ease the sting |
| 1:40.7 | of inflation. |
| 1:41.9 | Sometimes that's in the form of direct payments, tax credit, or maybe even a tax rebate. |
... |
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