The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the It Depends on the Price of the Bonds edition of Slate Money, your guide to the

business and finance news of the week. I'm Felix Salmon and I am joined as ever by Emily Peck

of The Hummington Post. Hello. Hello. And Anna Shamansky. And we have like a weird and wonderful group of stories for you this week. We are

going to be talking about secondhand clothes in Rwanda. Obviously this is a major story in the

global economy, but it kind of is and I kind of have been wanting to talk about Rwanda for a while.

So this is our excuse to talk about Rwanda for a while. So this is our

excuse to talk about Rwanda. We are going to talk about pregnant women in the workplace,

which is there's new news on that front. But first, I think, Emily, can you tell me about the Koch brothers and transit?

What is the, okay, yes, just there was this story which confused me, but you can explain it.

I think I can explain it.

It ran in the New York Times this week.

It was about the Koch brothers and how their funding efforts to basically squash public transportation projects across the country. The New York Times piece focused on Nashville, which had this like $5.4 billion package it was going to do on public transit.

It was like some light rail, a little tunnel, a little bus.

And everyone thought it was a sure thing, slam dunk kind of a project.

But then the Koch brothers got involved.

So Nashville, it turns out, is a massive city.

It's not some little music town. It's got like three or four million people and it's growing fast. And like any fast growing city, it needs to invest in transit because you can't just grow without transit. That's silly for city.

Oh, but the Koch brothers and their group Americans for prosperity very much do think you can grow without public transit. So they went around arguing that public transit was basically bad. And this package was bad because it would increase sales tax in Nashville by one percentage point. Which side note, sales tax in Nashville is actually very high.

It's like 9.5%, which I was kind of surprised by, but maybe you can explain to me why that is in a

I feel like local taxes. It's always just a choice. Some jurisdictions like sales tax, some jurisdictions have an income tax, some

jurisdictions have a property tax. So maybe that's it. New York has all three. But you,

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